Tag managment system and method

ABSTRACT

Embodiments of the systems described herein can implement one or more visitor stitching processes. Visitor stitching can include, among other things, one or more processes by which multiple visitors that may appear distinctly independent may be merged into a new single united visitor profile due to the leveraging of one or more unique persistent identifiers.

RELATED APPLICATIONS

This application is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No.16/250,948, filed Jan. 17, 2019, entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FORCONSTRUCTING CONTENT SITE VISITOR PROFILES,” which is a continuation ofU.S. patent application Ser. No. 15/698,023, filed Sep. 7, 2017,entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR APPLYING CONTENT SITE VISITOR PROFILES,”which is a continuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 15/166,111,filed May 26, 2016, entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR CONSTRUCTING CONTENTSITE VISITOR PROFILES,” which is a continuation of U.S. patentapplication Ser. No. 14/456,289, filed Aug. 11, 2014, entitled “SYSTEMAND METHOD FOR COMBINING CONTENT SITE VISITOR PROFILES,” which is acontinuation of U.S. patent application Ser. No. 14/216,801, filed Mar.17, 2014, entitled “SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR COMBINING CONTENT SITE VISITORPROFILES,” which claims priority under 35 U.S.C. § 119(e) as anonprovisional application of the following U.S. ProvisionalApplications:

App. No. Filing Date Title Attorney Docket 61/872,530 Aug. 30, 2013CONTENT SITE VISITOR TEALM.001PR PROCESSING SYSTEM 61/889,876 Oct. 11,2013 COMBINED SYNCHRONOUS AND TEALM.002PR ASYNCHRONOUS TAG DEPLOYMENT61/900,274 Nov. 5, 2013 UNIVERSAL VISITOR TEALM.003PR IDENTIFICATION INTAG MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS 61/896,351 Oct. 28, 2013 SYSTEM FOR PREFETCHINGTEALM.004PR DIGITAL MARKETING TAGS 61/939,972 Feb. 14, 2014 SYSTEM ANDMETHOD FOR TEALM.008PR COMBINING VISITOR PROFILES

The disclosures of each of the foregoing applications are herebyincorporated by reference in their entirety. Further, any subset of theembodiments described herein can be implemented in combination with anysubset of the embodiments described in the foregoing applications.

BACKGROUND

Some operators of content sites, such as websites, regularly obtain theresults of analytics performed with regard to user interactions on theircontent sites. User analytics can include any type of data regardinginteractions of end users with content sites, among other types of data.There are different approaches to gathering analytics data, one of whichincludes employing the use of tags.

Tags can include small pieces of website code that allow a websiteoperator to measure traffic and visitor behavior, understand the impactof online advertising and social channels, use remarketing and audiencetargeting, and test and improve a content site, among optionally otherfunctions. Adding tags to a content site has typically includedinvolving a developer to manually insert tag code into one or more pagesof a website.

SUMMARY

In certain embodiments, a method of combining content site visitorprofiles can include, under control of a hardware processor, receivingfirst content site interaction data from a first tag embedded within afirst content page, where the first content site interaction dataincludes a cookie-derived first visitor identifier associated with afirst visitor of the first content page; identifying a first persistentidentifier of the first visitor from the first content site interactiondata; receiving second content site interaction data from a second tagembedded within a second content page, where the second content siteinteraction data includes a cookie-derived second visitor identifierassociated with a second visitor of the second content page; identifyinga second persistent identifier of the second visitor from the secondcontent site interaction data; determining that the first and secondpersistent identifiers are the same; and in response to saiddetermining, aggregating the first content site interaction data withthe second content site interaction data in a single visitor profile,such that the first and second visitors are considered to be the samevisitor.

In certain embodiments, the method of the previous paragraph may beimplemented with any subcombination of the following features: the firstand second content pages can be the same content page, and the first andsecond tags can be separate instances of the same tag; the first andsecond content pages can be accessed from separate computing devices ofa single user; the first and second content pages can both be accessedby a single computing device, and the second content page can beaccessed by a user after the user removed a cookie associated with thefirst content page from the user device; the persistent identifier caninclude an email address or social network identifier; the persistentidentifier can include a phone number or mailing address; and thepersistent identifier can include a login credential.

In various embodiments, a system for combining content site visitorprofiles can include a hardware processor that can: access a firstvisitor profile associated with a first visitor to a content page;access a second visitor profile associated with a second visitor to acontent page, where the second visitor profile is separately identifiedfrom the first visitor profile by a second visitor identifier differentthan a first visitor identifier of the first visitor profile; identifyan alternative identifier of the first visitor separate from the firstvisitor identifier; determine that the alternative identifier is alsoassociated with the second visitor; and relate the first and secondvisitor profiles to produce a third visitor profile in response to thedetermination that the alternative identifier is also associated withthe second visitor.

In certain embodiments, the system of the previous paragraph may beimplemented with any subcombination of the following features: thealternative identifier can be a persistent identifier including one ormore of the following: an email address, a social network identifier,and a login credential; the alternative identifier can be provided by athird party tag other than a first party tag used to create the firstand second visitor identifiers; the alternative identifier can beprovided by a third party tag other than a first party tag used tocreate the first and second visitor identifiers; the hardware processorcan also identify an alternative identifier from visitor-supplied dataobtained from a tag script embedded within the content page; thehardware processor can also associate a second alternative identifierwith the third visitor profile; the hardware processor can also store ahash of the alternative identifier in association with the third visitorprofile; the hardware processor can also redirect processing of thethird visitor profile from a first server to a second server in responseto computing the hash; and the hardware processor can also select thesecond server based on a value of the hash.

Moreover, in certain embodiments, non-transitory physical computerstorage includes instructions stored thereon that, when executed by ahardware processor, can implement a visitor processing system forcombining content site visitor profiles. The visitor processing systemcan: create a first visitor profile based on first data regarding firstinteractions of a first visitor with a first content page, where thefirst interaction data may be obtained from a first tag embedded in thefirst content page; create a second visitor profile based on second dataregarding second interactions of a second visitor with a second contentpage, where the second interaction data can be obtained from a secondtag embedded in the second content page; identify a first identifier ofthe first visitor from the first interaction data, where the firstidentifier is not generated by the visitor processing system; identify asecond identifier of the first visitor from the first interaction data,where the second identifier also is not generated by the visitorprocessing system; compare the first and second identifiers; determinethat the first and second identifiers are equivalent based on thecomparison; and combine the first and second visitor profiles inresponse to said determination that the first and second identifiers areequivalent.

In certain embodiments, the non-transitory physical computer storage ofthe previous paragraph may be implemented with any subcombination of thefollowing features: the visitor processor system can also interleaveoverlapping portions of the first and second interaction data based ontimestamps in the first and second interaction data responsive to thedetermination that the first and second identifiers are equivalent; thevisitor processor system can also receive third interaction datasubsequent to the receipt of the second interaction data, where thethird interaction data identifies a visitor identifier generated by thevisitor processing system, and where the visitor identifier isassociated with the first and second visitor profiles; and the visitorprocessor system can also combine the third interaction data with thefirst and second interaction data.

For purposes of summarizing the disclosure, certain aspects, advantagesand novel features of several embodiments are described herein. It is tobe understood that not necessarily all such advantages can be achievedin accordance with any particular embodiment of the embodimentsdisclosed herein. Thus, the embodiments disclosed herein can be embodiedor carried out in a manner that achieves or optimizes one advantage orgroup of advantages as taught herein without necessarily achieving otheradvantages as may be taught or suggested herein.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

Throughout the drawings, reference numbers are re-used to indicatecorrespondence between referenced elements. The drawings are provided toillustrate embodiments of the features described herein and not to limitthe scope thereof.

FIG. 1 depicts an embodiment of a computing environment that providesaccess to an analytics system including a visitor processing systemand/or a tag management system.

FIG. 2 depicts an embodiment of a tagging overview process.

FIG. 3 depicts a more detailed embodiment of the visitor processingsystem of FIG. 1.

FIG. 4A depicts an embodiment of a visitor profile configurationprocess.

FIG. 4B depicts an embodiment of a visitor data analysis process.

FIG. 4C depicts an embodiment of a visitor segment reporting process.

FIGS. 5-7, 8A, 8B, 9-17, 18A, 18B, and 19-23 depict example userinterfaces that provide functionality for customizing visitor profiles.

FIG. 24 depicts an embodiment of a reporting user interface.

FIG. 25 depicts another embodiment of a computing environment, whichprovides distributed cloud-based access to a visitor processing system.

FIG. 26 depicts another embodiment of a visitor processing system.

FIG. 27 depicts an embodiment of an initial visitor profile creationprocess.

FIG. 28 depicts an embodiment of a persistent visitor profile process.

FIGS. 29A and 29B depict embodiments of visitor stitching processes.

FIG. 30 depicts an embodiment of a distributed visitor stitchingprocess.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION I. Introduction to Visitor Processing

Adding tags to web pages without efficient management can createsignificant problems and inconveniences. For instance, the code that isassociated with multiple tags can bog down a content site and be a majorperformance drain. Redundant or incorrectly applied tags can alsodistort measurements and result in duplicate costs or missing data. Poortag management can also be time consuming for the information technology(IT) department or webmaster team to add new tags, which may mean thatimportant marketing and measurement programs might be significantlydelayed.

Tag management systems have recently been introduced to improve themanagement of tags. Currently available tag management systems providecontent site operators somewhat greater control and ease of use inmanaging tag deployments in their content pages. In addition, some knowntag management systems provide some reporting functionality thatleverages data obtained from the tags.

Some of those existing systems provide rich but slow batch-based dataprocessing. Many of the batch-based systems tend to be batched on adaily basis and therefore cannot provide immediate notification of anychanges in web site visitor behavior throughout a day. Additionally,acting on the collected data from such systems typically requirescustom-coded and less flexible solutions.

Real time reporting may be available with some tag management systems,but the reports generated by such systems tend to be inflexible and arepredetermined by the vendor of the tag solution. These reports willalmost certainly not be visitor-centric, making them difficult to usefor inferring business-critical correlations. Additionally, acting onthe data in such systems is virtually impossible given the aggregatednature of the reporting data. Various solution vendors such as datamanagement platforms (DMP) or web analytics provide actionable segmentedvisitor based data sets. However, such solutions often lack flexibilityregarding the visitor definitions as well as lacking consistency acrossthe disparate vendor data sets used to create the rich visitor profiles.Further, these systems tend to provide little agility and certainly noreal-time definition of visitor definitions.

This disclosure describes embodiments of systems and methods that canaddress at least some or all of the foregoing drawbacks, among possiblyothers. In certain embodiments, a tag management system can deploy asingle tag or a tag container to a content site. Each page or any subsetof pages in the content site can incorporate the tag container as auniversal tag that can be used to gather any type of visitor data of avisitor to a content site. This tag container can be used to interfacewith any number of third party vendor tags without requiring, in certainembodiments, such tags to be coded expressly in the code of the contentpages of the content site. Thus, changes to the tagging of a contentsite may be made through a user interface provided by the tag managementsystem without having to use a developer to add the tags to the contentpages manually. As a result, the tag management system can be moreaccessible to marketing people without IT or programming knowledge.

This tag container approach to tag management can promote highscalability and provide marketing agility, enabling marketers and othermarketing users to rapidly change data collected or analyzed by the tagmanagement system. Further, since one tag container is embedded withinthe content pages, in certain embodiments, the content pages may loadfaster and, therefore, include many performance improvements.Additionally, the architecture of the tag management system and the tagcontainers themselves can facilitate other performance improvementswhich will be described in greater detail below. Moreover, there may bereduction of IT costs provided by using the disclosed tag managementsystem because IT personnel can shift away from performing marketingwork to focusing on IT work.

In certain embodiments, a visitor processing system is also describedherein, which can provide additional levels of marketing agility byproviding a solution that allows for a fully configurable visitor model.The visitor processing system may, but need not, be implemented inconjunction with the tag management system. The visitor processingsystem may provide the ability to see the results of this visitor modelin a real time or pseudo real time (such as within seconds or minutes ofmaking changes to the visitor model). This level of configurability canbe beneficial when a goal is to reduce a visitor set to a highlytargeted visitor segment. This rich configurability can include theability to set and manipulate a number of attributes on a visitor. Suchattributes can include badges, metrics (such as numerical functions),properties, dates, flags (such as Boolean values), and advancedattributes (such as funnels and sequences). By allowing marketing usersto configure attributes regarding their content sites' visitors, thevisitor processing system can enable marketing users to obtain real-time(or near real-time) reports on these visitors. These reports can providea highly desirable capability to filter a live and/or historic stream ofvisitors on the specified attributes, resulting in precisely targetedreporting on a highly segmented and highly targeted segment of visitorsin certain embodiments.

For purposes of summarizing the disclosure, certain aspects, advantagesand novel features of several embodiments are described herein. It is tobe understood that not necessarily all such advantages can be achievedin accordance with any particular embodiment of the embodimentsdisclosed herein. Thus, the embodiments disclosed herein can be embodiedor carried out in a manner that achieves or optimizes one advantage orgroup of advantages as taught herein without necessarily achieving otheradvantages as may be taught or suggested herein.

II. Example Visitor Processing Systems and Methods

Turning to FIG. 1, an embodiment of a computing environment 100 is shownfor implementing various tag features, including some or all of the tagmanagement and/or visitor processing features described above. In thecomputing environment 100, one or more end user systems 102 communicateover a network 108 with a content site 110. The end user systems 102 caninclude any form of computing device and may be desktops, laptops,smartphones, tablets, or the like. A browser 103 or other applicationsoftware installed in the end user systems 102 accesses one or morecontent pages 112 of the content site 110. The content pages may be webpages or other documents or files that may be accessed remotely andprovided to the end user systems 102. The content site 110 may be awebsite, a web server, an application server, a database server,combinations of the same, or the like. Further, the network 108 caninclude a local area network (LAN), a wide area network (WAN), a companyintranet, the public Internet, combinations of the same, or the like.

As shown, one or more content pages 112 of the content site 110 caninclude a tag container 114. The tag container 114 can be an example ofthe tag container described above and can be a universal tag that isinstalled or incorporated in one or more content pages 112 in place of,or instead of, incorporating numerous tags in each page. The tagcontainer 114 can communicate with one or more data collection tags 116,118 implemented on one or more tag servers 120. Both the content site110 and the tag servers 120 can be implemented in computer hardwareand/or software. The tags 116, 118 can include third party tags 116provided by tag vendors that are different entities than an operator of,or provider of, the tag container 114. In addition, the tags can includea visitor tag or tags 118 that can be provided by the same provider asthe provider of the tag container 114 (or a different provider in someembodiments).

An analytics system 130 is shown in communication with the tag servers120. The analytics system 130 can be implemented in computer hardwareand/or software. In the depicted embodiment, the analytics system 130includes a visitor processing system 140 and a tag management system150, as well as a visitor profile data repository 160. The visitorprocessing and tag management systems 140, 150 are shown separately forillustrative purposes, although their functionality may be implementedby a single system. The analytics system 130 can also be implementedwithout a tag management system 150, and thus, the functionality of thevisitor processing system 140 can be implemented independent of any tagmanagement functionality.

In certain embodiments, the visitor processing system 140 can enablemarketing users (described below) to configure the types of data trackedfor different visitors of the content site 110, as well as analyze andreport on this visitor data. For instance, in one embodiment, thevisitor processing system 140 can provide one or more user interfacesthat enable customization of collecting information about visitors tothe content site 110. This information can be obtained initially by thevisitor tag(s) 118, which may be provided through the tag container 114to the end user systems 102 for execution in the browser 103. Uponexecution in the browser 103, the visitor tag(s) 118 can supply visitordata to the visitor processing system 140 (optionally through the tagservers 120). Such visitor data can be stored in visitor profiles in thevisitor profile data repository 160, which may include physical computerstorage. Marketing users can subsequently query the visitor profiles toobtain reports or other information about visitors to the content site110. Other uses for visitor profile data are described in greater detailbelow.

The tag management system 150 can be used to manage the tags 116provided by third party vendors. For instance, the tag management system150 can provide functionality for marketing users to select which thirdparty vendor tags 116 to associate with the tag container 114 for avariety of vendor-specific processing purposes. These purposes caninclude obtaining analytics for data analysis or business intelligence,tracking affiliate activity with respect to the content site 110,obtaining user data for displaying targeted ads, obtaining user data forcustomizing search functionality or email campaigns targeted to the endusers, obtaining user data for personalizing content of the contentpages 112, obtaining user data for integration with social networkingfunctionality, obtaining user data for big data analysis, combinationsof the same, or the like. Data collected by the tags 116 can be providedto tag vendor systems 170, which can perform any of this vendor-specificprocessing. The data may alternatively be passed to the tag vendorsystems 170 through the tag management system 150.

In an embodiment, the tag management system 150 provides functionality(such as one or more user interfaces) for marketing users to map datasources in the content pages 112 to data sources gathered by the thirdparty vendor tags 116. For instance, if one of the content pages 112includes a shopping cart value named “cart value,” the tag managementsystem can provide a user interface that enables a user to tell the tagmanagement system 150 to collect data on the “cart value” and map thisdata to a “cart_value” variable of one of the tags 116. In addition, thetag management system 150 can provide similar functionality foridentifying which data sources of the content pages 112 are to begathered by the visitor tag 118.

However, in some embodiments, the visitor tag 118 can instead perform agreedy collection of some or all data available in the content page(s)112. Since the visitor tag 118, tag container 114, and visitorprocessing system 140 can be provided by the same entity, the dataobtained by the visitor tag 118 need not be mapped to third partymappings like the data obtained by the third party tags 116. Instead,some or all of the data available to the visitor tag 118 can be providedto the visitor processing system 140 for processing. Thus, the visitortag 118 can facilitate vendor-neutral data gathering of some or all ofthe data elements in a content page 112. Since this data is not mappedto a vendor-specific format in certain embodiments, the data can beexported to business intelligence systems without a need to massage thedata from its mapped form (which can be cumbersome) to its original, rawform.

Various marketing user systems 104 can access the analytics system 130and/or the tag servers 120 via the network 108. Like the end usersystems 102, the marketing user systems 104 can include a browser 105 orother application software that can access network applications over thenetwork 108. The marketing user systems 104 can also be any type ofcomputing device including, but not limited to, a desktop, laptop,tablet, smartphone, or the like. The marketing user systems 104 can beoperated by marketing users such as marketing professionals, websiteoperators, business users, operators of the content site 110, or anyother individual who uses tags or data obtained from tags. Marketingusers are not the end users of the content site 110 in certainembodiments. A marketing user might use a marketing user system 104 todynamically update the types of data tracked or analyzed for differentvisitors of the content site 110. This data can be tracked by thevisitor processing system 140 via either updating the visitor tag 116stored on the tag server 120 or by updating processing of data obtainedfrom the visitor tag 116 to build updated visitor profiles 130, manyexample features of which will be described in greater detail below.

Turning to FIG. 2, an embodiment of a tagging overview process 200 isshown. The tagging overview process 200 illustrates an example mode ofoperation of the computing environment 100 of FIG. 1 and may beimplemented by the various components shown in the computing environment100 of FIG. 1.

At block 202, of the process 200, an end user system 102 requestscontent such as a content page 112 from the content site 110. The enduser system 102 receives the content page 112 including a tag container114 at block 204. Thereafter, at block 206 the end user system 102 canrequest one or more tags 116 associated with the tag container 114 froma tag server 120. The tag container 114 may include script code such asJavascript code or the like embedded in the source of the content page112 initially requested by the end user system. The tag container 112,upon being processed by the browser 103 of the end user system 102, canprogrammatically access the visitor tag 118 (or other tag) stored on thetag server 120 to request the tag 118 to be provided or downloaded tothe end user system 102. The tag 118 itself may be a static file or thelike that includes executable code such as HTML code and/or script code,such as Javascript or the like.

The tag(s) 118 are received at block 208 at the end user system 102, andthe tag or tags 118 are executed at block 210 by the end user 102 systemto obtain visitor data about the end user 102 and to send the visitordata to the visitor processing system 140. In another embodiment, thevisitor data is sent to the tag server 110, which may store and processthe data or may forward the visitor data on to the visitor processingsystem 140. The visitor data may also be sent to both the tag server 120and the visitor processing system 140.

The visitor data can include any of a variety of information about theend user and the end user's interactions with the content site 110. Forinstance, the visitor data may include information about what type ofbrowser 103 or application the end user is using to access the contentsite 110. The visitor data may also include information about ageographic location of the user, a duration that the user is accessingthe content site 110 or is logged into the content site, or the like. Inaddition, the visitor data can include information about any interactionby the visitor with the content site 110 including, for example, anyclicks made by the visitor on links on the content page 112 served bythe content site 110, any user selection of a form element, or any userscroll behavior, text entry behavior in form text boxes, chat boxes,e-mail boxes, social networking, other user interaction with other userinterface controls, combinations of the same, or the like.

The visitor processing system 140 can aggregate the visitor data withunique visitor profiles for each end user visitor to the content site110 at block 212. By storing the visitor data in association with uniquevisitor profiles, the data may be associated with individual visitors.Unique visitor profiles may be maintained by obtaining, via the tag 118,identification data associated with the end users so as to match thevisitor data with a particular user's visitor profile. Theidentification data may be obtained by the tag 118, for example, byaccessing a cookie that may be installed in the end user system 102, byaccessing login information associated with the user if the user loggedinto the content site 110, by identifying the user's internet protocol(IP) address and/or a Media Access Control (MAC) address from networkpackets transmitted to and/or from the content site 110 and the end usersystems 102, combinations of the same or the like.

At block 214, the visitor processing system 140 generates visitorsegment reports, which can be custom reports accessible by marketingusers and which may include segment information on the aggregatedvisitor profile data organized by visitor segments. This segmentinformation can include information regarding visitors who are frequentvisitors to the content site 110, or information regarding visitors whoare frequent purchasers of the content sit 110, to name a few examples.Segments may advantageously be defined by the marketing users viacustomization user interfaces provided by the visitor processing system140, many examples of which are described in greater detail below (seeFIGS. 5 through 20). The custom reports provided by the visitorprocessing system 140 can be generated or updated in real time orsubstantially real time, for example, on the order of seconds or minutesin response to receiving updated visitor data.

In addition, marketing user customizations made to reports and/or typesof visitor data gathered or operations upon the data can take effect inreal or near real time. The reports can reflect this dynamic activity,advantageously in certain embodiments overcoming deficiencies inexisting systems that apply batch processing daily. Even in existingsystems that provide real time reporting, such systems may be controlledby the tag vendor and, therefore, may be inflexible or impossible tocustomize by the marketing users. In contrast, the visitor processingsystem 140 can enable the marketing users to have control over the typesof data collected and/or processed, the configuration rules that processthe data, and the way that such processed data is output via reports tothose users. As a result, in certain embodiments, the visitor processingsystem 140 can provide greater marketing agility to marketing users andcan provide increased performance for tracking visitor data.

Turning to FIG. 3, an embodiment of a visitor processing system 240 isshown in greater detail. The visitor processing system 240 can have allthe features of the visitor processing system 140. In the depictedembodiment, the visitor processing system 240 is in communication withthe marketing user systems 104 over a network 208, which may be thenetwork 108 described above with respect to FIG. 1. The visitorprocessing system 240 as shown includes various components such as avisitor profile configuration module 242, a visitor data collector 244,a visitor data aggregator 246, and a reporting module 248. A visitorprofiles data store 250 is also in communication with the visitorprocessing system 240. The visitor processing system 240 and each of thecomponents thereof can be implemented in computer hardware and/orsoftware. In some embodiments, the visitor processing system 240 can bepart of or used in conjunction with a tag management system, such as thetag management system 150.

The visitor profile configuration module 242 can output one or more userinterfaces that enable marketing users of the user systems 104 tocustomize the way that visitor data is tracked and/or analyzed by thevisitor processing system 240. Many example such user interfaces aredescribed in greater detail below. In general, in one embodiment, thevisitor profile configuration module 242 allows marketing users todefine visitor profile definitions or templates that include attributesof data to be collected from the content site 110 as well as rules to beused in transforming collected visitor data into visitor profiles forfurther analysis. The visitor profile templates can be stored in thevisitor profile data repository 250. Visitor data transformed intovisitor profiles based on one or more visitor profile templates may alsobe stored in the data repository 250. These visitor profiles may beaccessed by marketing users for reporting and marketing or businessintelligence analysis. The profiles may also be accessed from therepository 250 programmatically for taking further programmatic actionsuch as content page personalization (described in greater detailbelow).

The visitor data collector 244 can perform the actual data collection ofvisitor profile data by communicating with the tag 118 in the tag server120 described above with respect to FIG. 1. In one embodiment, the datacollection process works by the tag 118 itself including an inline frame(“iframe”) HTML element that further includes an HTML form. This framemay or may not be visible on the content page 112. The form canautomatically obtain visitor data elements from the content page andsubmit those visitor data elements to the visitor processing system 240(and/or tag server 120) via an HTTP POST or GET operation. In anotherembodiment, the tag can provide the visitor data to the visitor datacollector 244 using a web services communication scheme, for example, bymaking application programming interface (API) calls over the network108 to the visitor data collector 244.

The visitor data aggregator 246 can aggregate like data based on theparticular visitor and/or the type of data being aggregated, forexample, based on attributes of the data and/or user. For instance, if auser has visited a site a number of times, each time the user visits thesite the visitor data aggregator 246, can increment a variable orattribute corresponding to the number of times the user has visited thesite. Further, the visitor data aggregator 246 can apply one or morerules to those attributes in the visitor data to transform the visitordata into segment-based data. This segment data can provide enhancedinformation about segments of visitors to the content site 110. Forinstance, the visitor data aggregator 246 can assign one or more badgesor labels to a particular class of visitors based on a rule-basedanalysis of the visitors' browsing habits with respect to the contentsite 110. Users that share a particular badge can represent a segment ofusers having certain characteristics that may be interesting to studyfor targeted marketing or other purposes. The badges can also representgamification of analytics that can provide useful insights to marketingusers about visitor behavior. Badges are described in greater detailbelow (see, e.g., FIGS. 7 through 10).

Another example of information that can be aggregated by the visitordata aggregator 246 is metrics about the data. For instance, the visitordata aggregator 246 can compute a metric such as the total number ofpurchases made by a user on an ecommerce content site or other numericalvalues related to the user's interactions with the content site. Instill other embodiments, the visitor data aggregator 246 can compileattributes such as flags or Boolean values associated with the visitor'sprofile. Such flags might represent data related to whether a user hasleft unpurchased items in an electronic shopping cart, whether a usertends to use a chat function, or whether a user clicks social networkinglinks to share information about the content site, to name a fewexamples. Such flags or Boolean values can provide useful insight intothe activities of different users with respect to the content site.Still other attributes that can be determined by the visitor aggregatormodule 246 includes funnels, such as purchase funnels, and sequences, aswell as properties, dates and other attributes. These attributes aredescribed in greater detail below with respect to FIGS. 7 and 11-17.

The reporting module 248 can provide a custom reporting user interfacethat allows marketing users to query visitor attributes and organizevisitor attributes based on different segments or dimensions of thosevisitor attributes. For instance, such a user interface can allow usersto sort or organize or otherwise view a portion of visitors that share acommon attribute such as a badge or flag or funnel characteristic or thelike. Thus, the reporting module 248 can provide a flexible interfacefor marketing users to view different segments of the visitor profiledata. Further, changes made by users via the visitor profileconfiguration module 242 can be reflected in the reports provided by thereporting module 248 in real time or near real-time. Thus, for example,if an marketing user desires to track a new characteristic implementedon a content page, the user can easily specify via the visitor profileconfiguration module 242 to track this particular attribute, and thevisitor data collector 244 can begin tracking this data almostimmediately. Likewise, the visitor data aggregator 246 can rapidly beginaggregating the collected data, and the reporting module 248 can alsorapidly output this information in a format requested by the user. Thistype of flexibility provided by the visitor processing system 240 incertain embodiments can greatly enhance the ability of marketing usersto see rapidly-changing visitor behavior and gain insights into how topersonalize content pages to better target visitors or to promotepurchases or other desired visitor behavior.

Turning to FIGS. 4A through 4C, various additional processes 400, 420,and 440 are shown, which may be implemented by the visitor processingsystem 140 or 240 (or other components of the computing environment 100of FIG. 1). For instance, in FIG. 4A an embodiment of a visitor profileconfiguration process 400 is shown, which may be implemented by thevisitor profile configuration module 242 of FIG. 2.

At block 402 of FIG. 4A, the visitor profile configuration module 242can receive a request from a marketing user to configure a visitorprofile definition or template. In response, at block 404, theconfiguration module 242 can output a visitor profile user interfacethat enables the marketing user to specify site visitor attributes andrules of a visitor profile template to be applied to visitor data.Generally, any collection of one or more attributes and/or one or morerules may be part of a visitor profile definition or template. A userneed not define a specific visitor template explicitly, but may ratherdo so implicitly by defining one or more attributes and/or one or morerules. Thus, for convenience, the remainder of this specificationfrequently describes the definition of attributes and/or rules withoutspecifically referring to the creation of visitor profile definitions ortemplates. It should be understood that any reference to attribute orrule creation/editing features can be considered to refer to creation orediting of visitor profile templates.

At block 406 of FIG. 4A, the configuration module 242 can receivemarketing user configurations of site visitor attributes and/or rulesand store customized attributes and/or rules for later analysis anddynamic reporting at block 408.

Turning to FIG. 4B, an embodiment of a visitor data analysis process 420is shown that can be implemented, for example, by the visitor dataaggregator 246. The visitor data aggregator 246 can capture dataassociated with the visitors of a content site at block 422 andtransform this visitor data according to configuration rules 424. Theconfiguration rules may have been specified by an marketing user usingthe process 400 or the like described above. The visitor data analysisprocess 420 via the visitor data aggregator 246 can save the transformedvisitor data in visitor profiles created for each unique visitor atblock 426. At block 428, a visitor segment report can be provided basedon the visitor attributes and this block 428 may be implemented orperformed by the reporting module 248.

A more detailed view of a segment reporting process 440 is shown in FIG.4C. In the example process 440, the reporting module 248 can output areporting user interface for presentation to an marketing user at block442. The reporting module 248 can receive a user selection of the sitevisitor attributes for which to generate a report at block 444. At block446, the reporting module 248 can receive an marketing user queryparameters with respect to the selected site visitor attributes and maygenerate the segment report based on the selected visitor attributes atblock 448. The reporting module 248 can output the segment report forpresentation to the marketing user at block 450.

III. Example Visitor Processing System User Interfaces

FIGS. 5 through 24 depict example user interfaces that can be output bythe visitor processing system 140 or 240. These user interfaces includefeatures for customizing visitor profile template configurations,analyzing and generating segment reports, integrating visitor datacollected by the visitor processing system with external vendorfeatures, and the like. In particular, FIGS. 5 through 20 depict visitorprofile configuration user interfaces that can be generated by thevisitor profile configuration module 242, FIG. 21 is an example userreporting interface described below, and FIG. 22 is an exampleintegration user interface which is also described below. In addition,FIG. 23 depicts an example data source user interface, and FIG. 24depicts an example data mapping user interface. Each of these userinterfaces are described in greater detail below.

Each of the user interfaces shown includes one or more user interfacecontrols that can be selected by an marketing user, for example, using abrowser or other application software. Thus, each of the user interfacesshown may be output for presentation by a browser such as the browser105 or the like or any other application software. The user interfacecontrols shown are merely illustrative examples and can be varied inother embodiments. For instance, buttons, dropdown boxes, select boxes,text boxes, check boxes, slider controls, and other user interfacecontrols shown may be substituted with other types of user interfacecontrols that provide the same or similar functionality. Further, userinterface controls may be combined or divided into other sets of userinterface controls such that similar functionality or the samefunctionality may be provided with very different looking userinterfaces. Moreover, each of the user interface controls may beselected by a user using one or more input options, such as a mouse,touch screen input, or keyboard input, among other user interface inputoptions.

Turning to the visitor profile configuration user interfaces of FIGS. 5through 20, a visitor profile configuration user interface 500 in FIG. 5is shown. The user interface 500 includes features for constructingvisitor profile templates, discovering data with respect to visitorprofiles created from visitor data by generating reports and featuresfor obtaining visitor profiles through API access. The example visitorprofile configuration user interfaces can provide functionality formarketing users to specify different types of visitor profile templatesto be used in creating visitor profiles from captured visitor data.

In FIG. 5, the user interface 500 includes various menu options 510 foraccessing features of the visitor profile configuration module 242 andreporting module 248 of the visitor processing system 240. These menuoptions 510 include a set of tabs 512, 514 and 516 that may be selectedby a user. The menu options 510 include a build option 512 which uponselection can output a user interface 600 shown in FIG. 6 (describedbelow) or the like, a discover option 514 which upon selection canoutput a custom reports interface 2400 shown in FIG. 21 (describedbelow) or the like, and an API sampler option 516 which, upon selection,can output an integration user interface 2200 shown in FIG. 22(described below) or the like.

Using the build option 512, an marketing user can configure visitorprofile templates. As described above, a visitor profile template can bemade up of one or more attributes (or rules, discussed below) which aredefined or customized by a marketing user. Some attributes may beupdated each time an event happens, such as a visitor interaction with acontent page, while other attributors may be composed of multipleconditions and rely on values of other attributes created by themarketing user. As described above, badges are one example of theseattributes. A badge can include an icon or label that may be assigned toa visitor based on different attributes or characteristics of thatvisitor's interactions with the content page, whether within a singlevisit or over multiple visits.

One example of such a badge is shown in FIG. 5, the badge 530. The badge530 is shown as merely an example to illustrate one optionalconfiguration of an attribute that may be made by a marketing user. Thebadge 530 is titled “fan boy” and depicts a square icon with a smileyface superimposed therein. The “fanboy” badge represents the followingother attributes of a visitor, including that: the visitor has viewed atleast five products on the content site, has purchased at least 90% ofthe products viewed, and has visited the content site at least threeseparate times. These attributes may be configured by a marketing userusing the various user interfaces shown in FIGS. 6 through 20. Anotherexample of a badge that might be configured by a marketing user is awindow shopper badge. For instance, the window shopper might be assignedto a user having the following attributes: the user is visited at leastfour times to the content site, has never made a purchase, and has neveradded items to his shopping cart (or has added items to his or hershopping cart but has never purchased any of those items).

As another example, a frequent visitor badge might be assigned to a userwho has visited a content site a total of at least 20 times and hasvisited at least two times in the last seven days. As another example,an impulse buyer badge might be assigned to a user who has an averageproduct view per purchase of less than two and a total productspurchased is greater than one. Further, still another example of a badgemight be a VIP user badge that might be assigned if a user has visited acontent site more than two times per week, has a spending total inexcess of $1,000, and has tweeted a link or liked an item on the contentpage on Facebook (or another social networking site). These badges andthe criteria that trigger their assignment to visitors are merelyexamples of a massively customizable number of badges that may beconfigured by marketing users to represent visitors to the content sitebased on the attributes of their visiting interactions with the contentsite.

As described above, data about the user visits may be obtained by thetag container and the tag on the tag server and provided to the visitorprocessing system. The visitor processing system can apply theattributes and rules for transforming those attributes into badges orother types of attributes which will be described in greater detailbelow. Further, using the reporting user interface 2100 of FIG. 21 orthe like, a marketing user can analyze different segments of visitorsbased on the data collected about those visitors and transformed intospecific attributes such as badges.

a. Attribute Creation Overview and Example Badge Attribute Creation

Turning to FIG. 6, a user interface 600 is shown that may be obtained bya user selecting the build menu option 512 from FIG. 5. In the userinterface 600, user interface 600 options for selecting attributes 612and rule 614 are provided. The attributes 612 can be attributes ofvisitors or attributes associated with visitor interactions with thecontent site. The attributes may be as simple as flags indicatingwhether a user has performed a certain interaction with respect to thecontent site, such as clicking on a link or purchasing a product.Conversely, the attributes may be as complex as a funnel representing apredefined ordered list of events, such as a payment funnel that occursthrough a series of clicks or item selection events made by a user.

In the depicted embodiment, the attributes option 612 is selected and aplurality of example attributes 620 are shown organized by title, type,and scope. Some examples of these attributes include a “visit startdate” that may be set to determine when a user started visiting awebsite, a “visit end date” that may be used to determine when a visitorended his visit, a “visit duration,” “lifetime visit count,” and thelike. The attributes 620 shown can be collected for all end users thatvisit the content site or a subset thereof. Options may be provided insome embodiments for a marketing user to determine which subset of userswill be tracked according to the selected attributes.

The example types of attributes 620 shown include properties, metrics,dates, flags, sequences, and the like. Other attributes may also beprovided, examples of which will be described in greater detail below.The scope of the attributes can relate to the current visit that avisitor is experiencing with respect to the content site. The currentvisit can be a current browse session, for instance, with respect to thecontent site. The current visit may begin when the user initially loadsa content page from the content site and may end when the user leavesthe content page or is otherwise inactive for a period of time (such as30 minutes or more). Alternatively, the scope can refer to the visitorinstead of the current visit and may therefore correspond to lifetimevisits to the content page by the visitor. Other scopes are possible,including a configurable time period such as the past 30 days or thelike.

An add visitor attribute button 630 is also shown in the depictedembodiment. The add visitor attribute button 630 may be selected by auser to add a new visitor attribute to the list of attributes 620.Likewise, any of the attributes 620 may be selected by a marketing userto edit the attribute 620. Upon selection of the visitor attributebutton 630, a user interface such as the user interface 700 of FIG. 7may be output for presentation to the user.

In the user interface 700 of FIG. 7, various options for selectingattribute types 710 to create a new attribute are shown. Upon selectionof one of the attribute types 710, the user can define specificcharacteristics associated with the attribute to be used for analysis ofdata collected with respect to end users. Users whose characteristics ininteracting with the content site satisfy characteristics or rulesassociated with an attribute can be assigned that attribute. In thedepicted embodiment, the attribute types that can be selected frominclude badges, which can include labels or other indicia used toidentify segments of users (e.g., frequent visitors); metrics, which canstore numerical data such as a return visit count; metric sets, whichcan store sets or collections of metrics; properties, which can storestrings such as the name of a favorite product; property sets, which canstore sets of properties; flags, which can store true or false orBoolean values; dates, which can store a date value such as a date whena user last visited the content page; funnels, which can store apredetermined order list of events such as a payment funnel; andsequences, which can store an ordered list of events.

For illustrative purposes, creation of an attribute of the badge type isshown in detail with respect to FIGS. 8A through 10. Example userinterfaces for customizing other attribute types are described belowwith respect to FIGS. 11 through 17.

Referring to FIG. 8A, if the badge attribute type 710 is selected inFIG. 7, a user interface 800 or the like may be output for presentationto a user. In the user interface 800, various options 802 forconfiguring a badge attribute are output for presentation to a user.These options 802 include controls 810 for configuring characteristicsof a badge, such as the title of the badge. In the depicted example, thetitle of the badge is “Window Shopper” and may have been entered by amarketing user. The options 802 also include controls 810 for enteringany notes that a marketing user may wish to enter to describe the badge.

In the depicted embodiment, the scope for badges is the visitor scope,and thus the badge may correspond to lifetime visits by the visitor.However, in other embodiments, the scope can be for a current visitinstead of the visitor scope, or for some other time period as describedabove. The user interface controls 810 also include functionality forspecifying further details about the badge itself, such as a text labelto be displayed for the badge, an image to be selected for the badge,shape, theme, and colors to be selected for the badge, and the like.Thus, a marketing user can define any characteristic to be associatedwith a badge to distinguish the badge from other badges and to providecustomization of the look and feel of the badge.

In addition, a created transformation button 820 is also provided thatcan be selected by a marketing user to add a transformation for thebadge. The transformation can include one or more conditions or rulesthat transform incoming visitor data collected by the visitor datacollector 244 into data that represents the attribute shown. Inparticular, in the depicted embodiment, the rules can transform visitordata into an indication of whether a visitor should be assigned the“Window Shopper” badge. The transformations may be performed by thevisitor data aggregator 246 of FIG. 2, which can aggregate the data andtransform the data into a useable format according to the one or moreconditions or rules specified in the transformation. By selecting afinish button 830, the badge attribute can be created.

If the created transformation button 820 is selected, a popup box (notshown) can provide options for either assigning a badge based on a setof conditions or removing a badge from visitors when those conditions nolonger apply. Other conditions for assigning the badge to the visitorcan include when the visitor is a new visitor or when it is a new visitor upon any page event or the like.

If a user selects to assign a badge from the popup box, a user interfacesuch as user interface 850 of FIG. 8B can be displayed. In the userinterface 850 of FIG. 8B, an example transformation 830 is shown. Theexample transformation 830 includes an example condition 932 thatassigns this badge to a visitor when a visit has ended. Additional rulesmay be specified for triggering the assignment of this badge byselecting an “attach a rule” button 834. Upon selection of the attachrule button 834, a list of rules 836 can be displayed, from which a usercan select to attach to the transformation. Some example rules are shownin the list of rules 836, including “visit is direct,” “visit isreferred,” and so forth. Other rules may be selected by scrolling downthrough the list 836. These rules may be created by accessing the rulesoption 614 of FIG. 6, for example, as described in greater detail withrespect to FIG. 18A below.

Rules can also be created by selecting an “add a new rule” button 838.Selection of this button 838 can cause a user interface 900 shown FIG. 9to be displayed. (A similar interface can be selected from FIG. 6 tocreate a new rule; see FIGS. 18A and 18B) In the user interface 900 ofFIG. 9, a new rule creation box is shown that includes options forcreating a new rule, including a text box 910 for titling the rule. Inthis particular embodiment for the window shopper badge, a user hascreated a title “Did not purchase this” for this rule. One or moreconditions 920 can be selected for the rule. The condition 920 shown isan “if” condition and includes subconditions 922, 924, 926, and 927. Thesubconditions include a dropdown box 922 for selecting an attribute (seealso FIG. 18B). Any attribute available in the attribute list 620 ofFIG. 6 can be selected or a new attribute can be created (see FIG. 18B).A dropdown box 924 includes options for comparing the attribute selectedin the box 922 with some value selected from box 926. The value selectedin box 926 can be an attribute, such as a metric, or some custom valuethat can be specified in box 927. Controls 928 are provided for adding(or removing) additional conditions to the “if” statement. An “add orcondition” button 929 may also be selected to add a Boolean “OR”condition to the rule.

Referring to FIG. 10, a user interface 1000 is shown in which an examplerule has been attached to the transformation 830 for the “WindowShopper” badge of FIG. 8B. The rule 1033 is entitled “visitor did notpurchase.” This rule is triggered if the data object “cart_value” isgreater than zero. This rule may have been created using the userinterface 900 of FIG. 9 to specify that the data object “cart_value,”selected from the dropdown box 922, is greater than (box 924) a customvalue (box 926) of zero (text entered into box 927).

Thus, in certain embodiments, the badge window shopper created in FIGS.8 through 10 can be assigned to a visitor when a visit has ended and ifthe visitor did not purchase as specified by the rule 1033. Of course,additional rules may also be attached to any badge attribute to create amore complex set of conditions or rules that would trigger the badgebeing assigned to a visitor. Likewise, similar sets of one or more rulesor conditions can be attached to a badge attribute to remove or deassigna badge from a visitor.

b. Example Attribute Creation—Other Attributes

FIGS. 11 through 17 illustrate example user interfaces for creatingother types of attributes. Referring specifically to FIG. 11, an exampleuser interface 1100 is shown for configuring a metric attribute. Asdescribed above, metric attributes can store numerical data about a uservisit or collection of visits. In addition, metrics can performoperations on numerical data to produce new metric values, for instanceby performing transformations, much like the transformations that werediscussed above with respect to the badge attribute. The user interfacecontrols for configuring the metric attribute are similar to the userinterface controls for configuring the badge attribute in some respectsincluding, for example, controls 1110 for creating a title and enteringoptional notes about the metric attribute. In addition, a scope selector1112 allows the scope to be identified for this metric attribute asbeing either associated with the visitor (e.g., over a collection of thevisitor's visits) or for the current visit that the visitor has with thecontent site. Attributes created with the “current visit” scope can betriggered within each individual visit, as opposed to over severalvisits in some embodiments.

A “create a transformation button” 1120 may be selected by the user tocreate transformations. Upon selection of this button 1120, a select box1130 is shown giving options for creating different types oftransformations to associate with this metric attribute. These types caninclude an increment or decrement metric that increments or decrements ametric based on a set of conditions. For instance, a visit count can bea metric that uses the increment transformation such that each time anend user visits a content site, this metric is incremented by one toproduce a total visit count over the lifetime of the visitor. Othermetric creation options in the select box 1130 include a set ratiometric or transformation that can set the quotient of two metrics as anew ratio metric; a set product transformation that can set the productof two metrics as a new metric; a set difference transformation that canset the difference of two metrics as a new metric; a set sumtransformation that can set the sum of two metrics as a new metric; setmetric transformation that can set the metric to a specific number; anda set difference between two dates transformation that can set thedifference between two dates as a new metric. These transformations areexamples and may be further combined, for example, by creating both aproduct and a sum, or both a quotient and a difference, or any number ofdifferent operations to create a single metric from a plurality of datainputs related to visitor data.

Although not shown, a similar user interface could be used to define ametric set. Metric sets can include a set of metrics that is dynamic innature, in contrast to metrics, which may be static in nature. Anexample of a static metric is “time on site,” which can represent theamount of time a user spent in a browse session on a content site. Ametric set can grow over time with name-value pairs that representchanging metrics with respect to user visit behavior. For example, ametric sent might include an array of times to be collected, such as“time-spent[“football”]=120 minutes, time-spent[“baseball”]=60 minutes,”etc. The values in a metric set may be determined at runtime, ratherthan during configuration, although the opposite may be true in someembodiments.

For instance, as shown in FIG. 12, an example user interface 1200depicts a transformation 1230 selected from the create a transformationbutton 1120 to set a ratio. In the depicted embodiment, the options 1230enable a metric to be set to a first attribute value 1232 selected froma dropdown box divided by a second attribute value 1234 selected from adropdown box, when a certain triggering event occurs selected from adropdown box 1236 (such as when the visitor is a new visitor or when thevisit ends, etc.). Likewise, a rule 1238 can be attached to the metricto apply further processing or configuration to the metric. Rulecreation using the attach a rule button 1238 can be similar to rulecreation described above and below with respect to FIGS. 18A through 20.

FIG. 13 depicts an example user interface 1300 for configuring aproperty attribute. The user interface 1300 is similar to the other userinterfaces described above for creating or configuring attributes. Forexample, the user interface 1300 includes options 1310 for adding atitle and optional notes to associate with the property attribute aswell as scope buttons 1312 to determine the scope of this attribute.Upon selection of a creative transformation button 1320, transformations1330 are shown. One or more transformations can be created for thisattribute similar to the other attributes described above. Thetransformation 1330 provides options to set a property to a custom valueor another value defined elsewhere in the visitor processing system. Forinstance, data sources can be specified that are provided in the contentsite's content pages (see, e.g., FIG. 23). These data sources caninclude, e.g., a user name of the visitor, page name, cart value for anelectronic shopping cart value, or any other piece of data which thecontent page wishes to define and track. The property attribute can beset to this particular value specified by a data source or any otherattribute via the transformation 1330. As a result, the propertyattribute can be stored and also operated upon by other attributes orrules. As an example, a “cart_value” property attribute can be checkedby a rule in a “Window Shopper” badge attribute to determine whether auser ever purchases items or is merely just looking. Likewise,properties may be used to filter segments or otherwise arrange resultsin a reporting user interface (see, e.g., FIG. 21).

Although not shown, property sets can be configured similarly. Theattribute of a property set can contain more than one assigned stringproperty value. If a property (not a property set) called “category” isset to “football” (e.g., representing a football-related link selectedby a user) and is then set again to “baseball” (e.g., representing asimilar link), the result may change from “category=football” to“category=baseball.” Each of these properties is a string. In contrast,as property set called “category” can be first set to “football,” withthe result that “category=[football],” and can then be set to“baseball,” with the result that the string “baseball” is appended tothe property set such that “category=[football, baseball].” Propertysets can be used to detect correlations in visitor data, such as whethera visitor selected links related to both football and baseball within avisit (or multiple visits) to a content page.

In FIG. 14, another example user interface 1400 is shown, which can beused to configure a flag attribute. The user interface 1400 alsoincludes options 1410 for assigning a title and optional notes to theattribute as well as a scope button set 1412 to define the scope of theattribute. A create a transformation button 1420 is also shown, whichcan allow one or more transformations to be created. An exampletransformation 1430 shown can allow the flag to be set to a Booleanvalue such as true or false when a triggering condition or conditionsoccur, as defined by the dropdown box 1434, and optionally when one ormore rules are satisfied as may be defined by attaching a rule 1436. Ina simple example, the flag attribute may be a new visitor attribute andmay be assigned when the condition of a new visitor being detectedoccurs. In another example, the flag attribute may be titled “added itemto cart” and may be triggered when the condition of a visitor adding anitem to a shopping cart has occurred. This condition may be detected bya rule that detects when their cart value associated with the visitor isgreater than zero.

Turning to FIG. 15, an example user interface 1500 is shown forconfiguring a date attribute. Options 510 are provided for specifyingthe title of the attribute and optional notes are shown as well as scopebuttons 1512 for selecting the scope of the attribute. A creative atransformation button 1520 is shown, which upon selection, enables theuser to select from an options popup box 1522 to either “capture thedate” to set the date to the current time stamp or to “set a date” basedon a set of conditions. In the “capture the date” transformation shownas example transformation 1530, the date attribute can capture the dateand time when one or more following conditions are met specified bycondition 1532, such as during a visit. A rule may also be attachedusing button 1534. Thus, the date and time may be captured, forinstance, when a user adds an item to a shopping cart or clicks acertain link taking the user to a certain page, etc.

In FIG. 16, an example user interface 1600 is shown for configuring afunnel attribute. Option 1610 for assigning the title and notes aresupplied in the depicted embodiment. Scope variables are not provided asthe funnel attribute can be determined for a single visit.Alternatively, funnels can be determined from multiple visits. Create astep button 1620 is provided similar to the creative transformationbuttons described above. A funnel may include a series of stepsincluding one or more steps that, once satisfied, indicate that theattribute has occurred for a particular visitor. For instance, a funnelattribute can represent a series of steps taken by a visitor prior to(and optionally including) a purchase. Such a purchase funnel can beindicative of how close visitors come to purchasing items; visitors whomake it further into the funnel come closer to purchasing, and viceversa.

One example step 1630 is shown to update the funnel, including options1632 through 1638 for defining when the step has occurred. For instance,a text box 1632 is provided for specifying a title of the step, and aselect box 1634 and attribute button 1636 are provided for addingattributes to capture related to the funnel. A condition box 1638 isprovided for determining when this step is considered to have occurred.Further, a rule may be attached by selecting a rule button 1640.

In certain embodiments, funnels can provide for the configuration of anexpected flow that has a known (or anticipated) start and end. Forexample, a shopping experience on an electronic commerce website can bemodeled as a funnel attribute, with step 1 being viewing a product(e.g., any number of times), step 2 being adding the item to a cart,step 3 being to proceed to checkout, step 4 being filling out shippinginformation, step 5 including filling out billing information, and step6 including confirming the order. The funnel attribute can allow thevisitor to be traced through the funnel, providing a resulting report ofwhere visitors fall out of the funnel (e.g., by stopping at a certainstep in the funnel). This report may be useful to marketing users whowish to determine the conversion rate of end users, among other usefuldata.

Funnel attributes may be time-ordered, such that in order for a funnelto be associated with a visitor, the visitor must follow the steps ofthe funnel in order. Other configurations that are not based ontime-ordering are possible. Data may be captured at each step of thefunnel or at the end of the funnel. For instance, it may be useful toinspect the value of a shopping cart that a user abandoned midway into apurchase funnel. Other funnel attribute features can include the abilityto make a step optional, meaning it can be skipped. In the exampleabove, shipping is often skipped because the billing info often providesall the info needed for shipping.

Purchase funnels are merely one example use of funnel attributes. Otherexample uses for funnels include campaigns, flight check-ins, emailsign-ups, or any other sequence of steps that use an online tool on thecontent site.

Referring to FIG. 17, an example user interface 1700 is shown forconfiguring a sequence attribute. The user interface 1700 includesoption 1710 for specifying a title and optional notes and a scope button1712 for selecting the scope. In addition, the user interface 1700includes a button 1720 for creating an entry, which can be similar tothe create transformation buttons described above. One or more entriesmay be created to update a sequence. An example entry 1730 is shown thatrecords an event for the sequence. The entry 1730 can capture attributedata specified using a select box 1732 and add/or attribute button 1734upon a condition occurring as specified by the dropdown box 1736.Optionally, a rule may also be attached 1738.

In contrast to funnel attributes, which may have a defined end-goal(such as a purchase), sequences can log or track more general datapoints, such as click actions or link selection actions of an end user.Sequences can provide a mechanism for logging significant visitor eventsas a historical trace, without the need to store all the data betweenthe events. For example, an end user's purchase history with respect toan electronic commerce site can be represented by a sequence attribute.The purchase history sequence can include a list of the user's purchasesbut may not include, for example, each of the user links selectedbetween purchases. Another example of a sequence can be a search keywordhistory that resulted in a user finding a content page. Yet anotherexample can include a list of movies watched (e.g., in a Netflix™queue), and the like. Events in a sequence may be associated with atimestamp so that later analysis of the sequence can compare timestampsof the events.

c. Additional Rule Creation Features

FIG. 18A shows another view of the example user interface 600 of FIG. 6.In particular, the user interface 1800 shows that the rules option 614of FIG. 6 is selected. A set of rules 1804 is shown, which may have beencreated by the user or provided by the vendor of the visitor processingsystem. Each of the rules 1804 may be selected for customization by amarketing user. A new rule may also be created by selecting the add rulebutton 1806. Various features for creating rules have been describedabove.

In addition, selecting the add rule button 1806 can show a userinterface, such as an example user interface 1850 shown in FIG. 18B. Theuser interface 1850 provides options 1810 for titling and annotating arule as well as conditions 1830 to specify for the rule. Selection ofthese conditions can include dropdown boxes 1832, 1834, and 1836 forspecifying subconditions associated with the condition. An example listof attributes 1833 is shown, from which visitor attributes may beselected, data sources may be selected, or the like. Mathematicaloperators may be selected via the dropdown box 1834 to compare theattribute with a custom value as specified in the dropdown box 1836 ortext box 1838. For example, an attribute may be selected from thedropdown box 1832 and compared with a metric or property that is definedelsewhere in the set of attributes described above. Select boxes 1840can be used to add or take away conditions. An “add or condition” button1842 can be selected to add one or more additional Boolean “OR”conditions.

FIG. 19 shows an example user interface 1900 similar to that of FIG.18B, depicting the custom value dropdown box 1836 selected to showvarious custom values 1837 that could be specified when creating a rule.In FIG. 20, an example user interface 2000 shows how attributes can beadded from within the rule creation process with various attributestypes 2010 being selectable. The user interface 2000 may be output forpresentation to a user upon selection of an add visitor attribute button1839 in FIG. 19 and may have similar functionality to the attributioncreation user interfaces described above.

d. Example Report Generation Features

Turning to FIG. 21, an example reporting user interface is shown. In theexample reporting user interface 2100, options are shown for filteringthe various attributes that have been defined for visitors to produce aset of results 2140 that illustrate aggregations or segments of visitorprofile data. The filters include metrics filters 2112 that enable amarketing user to select different metrics associated with visitors aswell as flag filters 2114 and badge filters 2116. Other filters may alsobe included in other embodiments.

A user may select one or more of the metrics filters 2112 to adjustmetrics associated with different users to be output in the reportingsection 2140. In the depicted embodiment, these metrics include productspurchased, orders placed, total visits, language, total purchase count,total purchase amount, and time of sale. These metrics may have beendefined using the interfaces described above. Different slider selectiontools 2111, 2113, and 2115 allow users to adjust the values of metricsdata to be displayed. For instance, the slider 2111 depicts values for atotal purchase count that may be selected. In this depicted embodiment,the user selected a total purchase count between 10 and 30 to therebyview a segment of visitors that purchased between 10 and 30 items.Likewise, the slider 2113 has been used to select a total purchaseamount between values of 30,000 and 60,000. The slider 2115 shows themetric “time of sale” being selected between 10:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m.

Within the flag filters 2114, various flags are shown such as “has madepurchase,” “emailed link,” “retweeted link,” and “returning visitor,” aswell as a number of times that those flags have occurred indicated byamount 2119. Check boxes 2117 next to the flags are provided forselectively selecting the flags to filter the output of the reportingarea 2140. Similarly, check boxes 2117 are next to different badges inthe badge filters 2116. Different badges are shown such as “VIP,”“window shopper,” “fan boy,” and the like, next to amounts 2119 ofvisitors that have earned these badges or been assigned these badges.Any combination of the badges may be selected with the check boxes 2117to filter the output of the reporting display 2140.

The output of the reporting display 2140 can also be adjusted byselecting the different perspective to show the reporting data fromusing a drop down box 2120 that shows (in this embodiment) that theperspective is from the point of view of flags. Thus, different bars2141 in the reporting display 2140 reflect value amounts 2119 thatdifferent flags represent, such as “has made purchase,” “emailed link,”etc. A query is shown at the top represented by controls 2136 thatrepresents the selections of the filters 2110 to filter the differentflags. Each of the subaspects of the query can be deselected by clickingon X buttons 2137. In addition, selection of a particular bar of the bargraph 2142 can show snapshots 2150 of the metrics. The example reportinginterface 2100 is illustrative only and may be varied considerably inother embodiments.

e. Example API Data Integration Features

Turning to FIG. 22, an example user interface 2200 is shown forintegrating raw data output by the visitor processing system with thirdparty vendor data or systems. The integration user interface 2200 canprovide functionality for building a sample query using controls 2210 toquery their live feed or other date ranges for data. Additional APIaccess can be provided for developers of third party vendors to accessthe raw visitor data collected by the visitor processing system andprocessed using the transformations and rules described above.

The raw data may be used for more than just reporting, either by thevisitor processing system itself or these third party vendors. Forinstance, the data output by the visitor processing system can be usedfor generating ads or ad campaigns, email campaigns, personalizationincluding ads or recommendations or the like. For instance, in oneembodiment the visitor processing system outputs a periodic feed (forexample daily, monthly, weekly, hourly) of data from the visitorprocessing system to external vendors so that the vendors can use thisdata to update information about visitors. The data in the feed can beused to perform business intelligence, aggregate the data for long-termtrends and trend analysis, and the like.

In yet another embodiment, the raw data or processed data output by thevisitor processing system can be used to update the content site itselfby personalizing the content of the content site based on the visitorsand their attributes. For instance, a marketing user may create a“chatter” badge that is assigned to visitors who are influenced by chatbecause they tend to purchase items when they are using a chat functionon the content site. If such a visitor comes to the content site, thecontent site can programmatically personalize itself to show a chatwindow more prominently for that particular visitor. As another example,if a visitor is assigned a VIP badge, the content site may not show adsto the user. If the user is a regular buyer, the content site may give a10% discount offer to that user. As yet another example, if a badge“early adopter” is assigned to a visitor, the content site may show thelatest electronic gadgets to the user or prioritize those gadgets in adisplay to a user over other gadgets or products.

f. Example Data Source Specification and Mapping Features

Referring to FIG. 23, an example data source user interface 2300 isshown. As described above, data sources may be accessed when creatingattributes and/or rules to access data that is part of the content pageor that is associated with the browser or end user system itself. Thesedata sources may be specified by a marketing user associated with thecontent site so that the visitor processing system can be aware of thesedata sources and know to collect their data. For instance, if thecontent site is an electronic shopping site and has a shopping cart, andif one of its content pages has a “cart value” data source, themarketing user can use this user interface 2300 to specify that the cartvalue data source is available and should be obtained for analysis inthe visitor data.

A button 2302 is provided for adding a data source. Upon selection ofthis button, a row can be added to the user interface 2300. Datainserted in the new row can be saved in computer storage, such as in adatabase. The row can include a text box 2310 for specifying the name ofthe data source, select boxes 2320 for specifying the type of the datasource, and a description box 2334 providing a written description ofthe data source. The name 2310 in the text box 2310 can be the name ofthe data source used by the content site. Specifying this name canenable the visitor processing system to be aware of which variable ordata source to look for when obtaining data using the tag container 114and/or tag 118 (see FIG. 1).

The type of the data source identified in the dropdown box 2310 can be adata object that is associated with the page itself, it may be aJavascript page variable or other script value associated with the page,a meta tag associated with the page, a query string parameter associatedwith an HTTP PUT or GET statement, or a cookie value that is associatedwith the end user system or browser. Other options are also possible.Thus, if the data sources are specified in the user interface 2300, thevisitor processing system can obtain data from the specified datasources using an appropriate tag 118.

As shown in FIG. 24, a user interface 2400 for mapping the data sourcescan be used for some tags. The user interface 2400 shows example tagsadded to the tag server(s) 120 from third party vendors. In the depictedembodiment, these tags include a live person tag and a Google™ Analyticstag. Configuration details 2702 for the Google™ Analytics tag areprovided and mapped data sources 2710 are also shown. The mapped datasource functionality can be provided to enable a user to map the datasources defined in the user interface 2300 to a data source in the tagvendor's tag. However, in certain embodiments, such mapping is notperformed by the visitor processing system for the visitor attributesand rules described above. Rather, the mapping may not be needed becausethe visitor processing system can collect all the data sources specifiedby the marketing user and can make these available in the attributes andrules configuration displays without further mapping required. Mappingmay instead be used with such visitor rules and attributes in otherembodiments.

g. Detailed Example Computing Environments

Turning to FIG. 25, a more detailed example embodiment of a computingenvironment 2500 is shown that can perform any of the tag managementfeatures described herein. The computing environment 2500 is a moredetailed example of implementation of the computing environment 100 ofFIG. 1. As in FIG. 1, end user systems 102 are shown in communicationwith content sites 110 which may communicate over a network (not shown).In addition, marketing user systems 104 are also shown. The computingenvironment 2500 facilitates implementation of a tag management system2540, which may include the functionality of the visitor processingsystems described above. Alternatively, the functionality of the visitorprocessing systems may be implemented in place of the tag managementsystem 2540 in FIG. 25, without using some or all of the features of thetag management systems described herein.

In the depicted embodiment, the tag management system 2540 is showndistributed in a cloud platform that provides redundant andgeographically dispersed access to the tag management system 2540. Inparticular, the tag management system 2540 is implemented in variouscloud regions 2572. These cloud regions may be implemented in any typeof cloud platform, which may simply be a data center operated by avendor of the tag management system or by a third party vendor such asAmazon Web Services™, Microsoft Azure™, Rackspace™ Linode™, combinationsof the same, or the like. Each cloud region 2572 includes a loadbalancer 2576 that can balance requests to tag management systeminstances 2540.

The tag management system instances 2540 can be implemented as virtualmachines and/or physical machines. In the Amazon Web Servicesembodiment, the instances 2540 can be elastic compute cloud (EC2)instances that are distributed geographically for faster and redundantaccess to geographically dispersed analysis user systems 104. Inaddition, visitor profile data storage devices 2530 are shown in thedifferent cloud regions 2572 and can store tag and visitor data in thecloud. Virtual private network (VPN) tunnels 2580 facilitate securecommunication in a virtual private network among the different cloudregions 2572 and enable administrator users (not shown) of the tagmanagement system to access tag management system instances 2540.

In an embodiment, the virtual private network is facilitated or providedby a private cloud service, such as the Virtual Private Cloud (VPC)service provided by Amazon Web Services™. The private cloud service canprovide security to the tag management system instances 2540 by virtueof obscuring IP addresses of the tag management instances 2540. The tagmanagement system instances 2540 may have nonpublic IP addresses so thateach tag management system instance 2540 does not need to have securitysoftware that is responsible for securing the tag management system 2540itself.

A geodns provider 2560 is provided for interfacing between content sites110, analysis user systems 104, and the various tag management systeminstances 2540. The geodns provider 2560 also provides access topublished tags 2590 which are stored in tag servers 2594 accessiblethrough one or more or content delivery networks (CDNs) 2592. Thefunction of the geodns provider 2560 in one embodiment is toperiodically determine which CDN hosting the tags has the lowestlatency, thereby selecting which CDN to point the content site 110 towhen accessing tags on the tag servers 2594. The geodns provider 2560may implement the DYN DNS system in one embodiment.

Advantageously, in certain embodiments, by storing tags in CDNs, tagaccess can be much faster than if tags were stored in locally hosted tagservers. Further, by using a geodns provider 2560, access to tags can beeven more rapidly achieved by cycling through the fastest available CDNs2592.

Turning to FIG. 26, another embodiment of a visitor processing system2600 is shown. The visitor processing system 2600 can include any of thefeatures of the visitor processing systems 140, 240 described above. Forinstance, the visitor processing system 2600 can generate any of theuser interfaces described above. Likewise, any of these visitorprocessing systems 140, 240 can implement any of the features of thevisitor processing system 2600. The visitor processing system 2600represents an example detailed implementation of tag management forvisitor profile creation.

In the depicted embodiment, the visitor processing system 2600 includesa visit event collector 2610, a message queue 2620, a message router2630, a visitor processor 2640, and a query aggregator 2650. Inaddition, the visitor processing system 2600 includes a visitor profiledata repository 2670 and a REST server 2660. The visit event collector2610 can include any of the features of the visitor data collector 244of FIG. 3 or a portion thereof. Likewise, the visitor processor 2640 andquery aggregator 2650 can implement the functionality of the visitordata aggregator 246 of FIG. 3 or a portion thereof. Further, the RESTserver 2660 can implement the functionality of the reporting module 248of FIG. 3 or a portion thereof. Moreover, the visitor profile data store2670 can store any of the data stored by the data store 270 of FIG. 3.In addition, the components shown in FIG. 26 can include additionalfunctionality.

Each of the components shown can be implemented in computer hardwareand/or software. In one embodiment, the components shown are implementedas software instances running in hardware. Some or all of the componentsmay be implemented with multiple instances, which may be geographicallyco-located or geographically dispersed. Arrows between the componentsshown in FIG. 26 represent example flow of data and/or messages betweenthe components, for example, over a network or via interprocesscommunication on the same computing device (e.g., a server). Althoughsome possible communication paths between the components are indicatedby these arrows, other communication paths between the components arealso possible.

In the depicted embodiment, the visit event collector 2610 receivesvisitor event information. This visitor event information may beobtained by a tag container invoking a visitor tag. The tag containercan be embedded in a content page of a content site accessed by avisitor, and the tag container can load the visitor tag (e.g., from aseparate tag server—see, e.g., FIG. 3). The visitor event informationcan include any of the visitor profile data or visitor data describedabove, including data about any end user interaction with the contentpage(s), data about the end user's system hardware and/or software (suchas browser type), and so forth.

The visit event collector 2610 can publish a visitor event containingthe visitor event information in response to receiving the visitor eventinformation. The visit event collector 2610 provides this visitor eventto a message queue 2620 in one embodiment. The message queue 2620 canimplement message broker functionality that implements the AdvancedMessage Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard. For example, the message queue2620 can perform asynchronous routing of messages between the variouscomponents of the visitor processing system 2600. In one embodiment, themessage queue 2620 implements some or all of the features of theRabbitMQ message broker system. However, the message queue 2620 canimplement other message brokering systems in other embodiments.

The message queue 2620 provides an event message, picked from a queue,to a message router 2630 on a first come, first serve basis. The eventmessage can include the visitor event data published by the visit eventcollector 2610 to the message queue 2620. In response to receiving theevent message, the message router 2630 can route the event message to asharded queue implemented by the message queue 2620. The sharded queuemay be implemented over multiple servers to increase parallelism andprocessing efficiency.

The sharded queue provides sharded event messages (e.g., portions of theevent message) to a visitor processor 2640. The visitor processor 2640can aggregate data from the sharded event messages based on attributesof the data and/or user. For instance, the visitor processor 2640 canperform any of the aggregation functionality of the visitor dataaggregator 246 to produce visitor profile data based on attributes andrules, as described above. The visitor processor 2640 can persistvisitor profile data in visitor profile storage 2672 of the visitorprofile data store 2670, for example, in response to the end user'svisit to the content site expiring or ending. The visitor processor 2640can also include an in-memory set of active visitor profiles 2642associated with current visitors to the content site (or sites). Thevisitor processor 2640 can persist the in-memory set of active visitorprofiles 2642 to visitor stream query storage 2674 in the visitor datastore 2670.

In addition, a query aggregator 2650 obtains sharded visitor queryresults from the message queue 2620 (e.g., in response to a query from amarketing user) and maintains an in-memory set of aggregated visitorprofiles 2652. The query aggregator 2650 also persists a near realtimeaggregate visitor report in aggregated visitor result storage 2676,which can be accessed as part of a user query.

The REST server 2660 can received submitted queries and return queryresults in response, using HTTP, SOAP, or other representational statetransfer (REST) protocols (or another protocol). Upon receiving a queryfor visitor profile data (see FIG. 21 for a query example), the RESTserver 2660 can obtain the requested data from the visitor profile datastore 2670. In particular, the REST server 2660 can retrieve historicalquery results from the visitor profile storage 2672, near realtimevisitor stream query results from the visitor stream query storage 2674,and near realtime aggregate visitor query results from the aggregatedvisitor result storage 2676.

In an embodiment, the query can be streamed or reported. Streamedqueries can include queries for the raw visitor profiles themselves, sothat further processing can be done (for example) by a marketing usersystem. Reported queries can request reports based on visitor profiles,such as the example report shown in FIG. 21. Historical queries are alsopossible, showing reports for a set of visitors at a previous point intime (such as a day ago, or a week, month, or year ago) as opposed tolive, real time or near-real time (which can be the default queryoption). A marketing user may wish to compare historical results from ayear ago with current results (or with other historical results).

IV. Visitor Stitching Embodiments

A content site 110 can integrate the services of a traditional webanalytics system for the purpose of tracking its visitors for behavioralanalysis. Tracking these visitors can be done so that when visitorsrender content within the property or application, the tracking code istriggered. This tracking code can then invoke an event call (e.g., viaHTTP(S)) back to the web analytics system for collection. Examples ofsuch tracking code are described above, including the tag container 114and tags 116, 118 (see, e.g., FIG. 1).

The collection of events from a single user-agent (e.g., the clientsoftware, such as the browser 103 of FIG. 1) may be associated as achronological sequence of events known as a visit (sometimes referred toalso as a session). More specifically, the visit can be comprised ofsome or all the sequenced set of events from the beginning of a visituntil a pre-determined period of inactivity has occurred. For example, auser may open a fresh web browser, navigate to a content site such aswww.acme.com, followed by some number of page views. Each page view canbe considered an event. Further, data entered by the user into a formcan also be considered an event. Other events can correspond to any ofthe attributes described above (such as events related to badges,funnels, sequences, etc.). Each event can be associated with a singlevisit of a user. In an embodiment, once thirty minutes (or some otherpredefined time value) pass without another page view, the web analyticssystem can consider that visit concluded. Another following page view(whether the browser was closed or not) may be considered the firstevent of a new visit.

A visitor can be associated with a visitor profile having a collectionof visits associated with a single user-agent. A user-agent can includea single web browser or application on a single device or end usersystem 102. Such visitors may be provided a tracking identifier providedby the web analytics system (see FIG. 27, described below). Theseidentifiers may be random in nature, in order to ensure that noduplicates occur. These identifiers may be provided back by theuser-agent in order for the web analytics system to identify thehistorical data to associate freshly received (incoming) events.

A challenge of this tracking results from many people interacting with aweb property or application from multiple user-agents or devices. Thesame challenge can be expressed in a much older scenario regarding thedeletion of cookies. Any standards-based web browser provides a featureallowing the user to delete any or all cookies. Because cookies may beutilized by web analytic services (including any of the systemsdescribed herein) to store the visitor identifier, the ability to deletecookies may cause the web analytic vendors to interpret the visitor asnew upon the next visit, resulting in the assignment of a newidentifier. Because this new identifier can be different from theprevious identifier, the visitor may now be severed from any historicalbehavior.

In both of these cases, it can be highly desirable to capture thecomplete picture of a user's behavior as it can be expressed acrossdevices and web browser cookie cleanses. Desirably, a single user shouldbe identifiable as one visitor as the user navigates a web property orapplication across browsers or devices.

Embodiments of the systems described herein can advantageously implementone or more visitor stitching processes to address some or all of thedrawbacks identified above. Visitor stitching can include, among otherthings, one or more processes by which multiple visitors that may appeardistinctly independent may be merged into a single united visitorprofile (often referred to hererin simply as a “visitor”) due to theleveraging of one or more persistent identifiers. Like the identifierissued by the web analytics service, a persistent identifer can beunique to the visitor. However, its uniqueness may go beyond that of theuniquess of the web analytics service. Due to the nature of a persistentidentifier, a persistent identifier may not change based on which deviceis used or which browser is used. A persistent identifier can also beless sensitive to “cookie cleansing.”

Some examples of persistent identifiers include email addresses, socialnetworking identifiers (such as Facebook™ or Twitter™ identifiers),login credentials such as web property or application login usernames,phone numbers, mailing addresses, and the like. These identifiers canhave the unique characteristic of being the user's credentials for oneor more websites or applications. More generally, any identifierassociated with a user that can represent a user from a differentperspective or channel from an identifier provided by the visitorprocessing system can be used as a persistent identifier. Theseidentifiers might be first-party identifiers or third-party identifiersintended to provide direct or cross-site authentication (such as socialnetworking identifiers such as Facebook Connect identifiers). Persistentidentifiers can provide a much more consistent representation of a userthan the content-page specific visitor identifiers provided by thevisitor processing system.

Visitor stitching can be performed by any of the systems describedherein. For example, the visitor processing system 140 or 240, tagmanagement system 2540, or visitor processor 2640 can implement thevisitor stitching processes described herein. For convenience, theremainder of this disclosure will refer to the visitor stitching andrelated processes as being implemented by a visitor processing system orvisitor processor, although it should be understood that these shorthandreferences can refer to any of the systems or subsystems describedherein.

As described more fully above, the visitor processing system can providea new level of marketing agility by providing a solution that, incertain embodiments, allows for a fully-configurable visitor model,while seeing the results of this model in real time or pseudo-real time.This level of configurability can be beneficial when the goal can be toreduce a visitor set to a highly targeted visitor segment. As describedabove with respect to FIGS. 1-26, this rich configurability can includethe ability to set and manipulate a number of attributes on a visitor.By allowing the user to configure attributes on their visitordefinition, the user can subsequently view reports on these attributes.These reports can provide the capability to filter a live or historicstream of visitors on these specific attributes, resulting in a highlysegmented and highly targeted segment of visitors.

A visitor stitching process can be a real-time or pseudo-real timeprocess that can be initiated whenever a persistent identifier isreceived. The above description of the visitor processing systemmentions a property as one of the available attributes or data pointsthat can be associated with a visitor. A persistent identifier can beconfigured as a special type of property. A persistent identifier can bea property that triggers the visitor stitching process. This specialproperty can be referred to within the visitor processing system and bythe user interface as a multi-channel visitor ID in someimplementations.

When an event containing one or more persistent identifiers is receivedby the visitor processing system, a visitor stitching process can beinitiated, which can conclude by associating the event with theresultant merged visitor. This merged visitor can be the product of thevisitor stitching process merging any and some or all seeminglyindependent visitors (e.g., visitor profiles). This resultant mergedvisitor or visitor profile may later be further stitched or merged intoa more comprehensive stitched visitor as other persistent identifiersare discovered, as will be described in greater detail below.

a. Example Visitor Stitching Processes

Example visitor stitching processes will now be described with respectto FIGS. 27 through 30. Prior to describing example visitor stitchingprocesses in FIGS. 29 and 30, an initial visitor profile creationprocess will be described with respect to FIG. 27, and a persistentvisitor profile process will be described with respect to FIG. 28. Eachof these processes may be implemented by any of the visitor processingsystems or visitor processers described herein, or by any othercomputing device.

Turning to FIG. 27, an initial visitor profile creation process 2700 isshown. At block 2702, the tag container 114 of FIG. 1 or another tag(e.g., 116 or 118) reports a visitor to a content page 112 to thevisitor processing system. The information reported by the tag or tagcontainer may include an identifier that the tag or tag containerobtained from a cookie from the visitor's browser 103. Thus, at block2704, it is determined whether the visitor has an identifier (previouslyset by the visitor processing system) in a cookie associated with thecontent page. If so, the process 2700 ends, as the purpose of thisprocess 2700 is to assign a visitor identifier to visitors that do notalready have one.

If the visitor does not have a visitor identifier, the process 2700proceeds to block 2706, where a visitor profile with a visitoridentifier is created for the visitor. The visitor identifier can be analphanumeric (or just alpha or just numeric) identifier that is randomlyselected or incremented to be unique from other visitor identifiers. Thevisitor processing system passes the visitor identifier to the tagcontainer (or other tag) for storage in a cookie associated with thecontent page at block 2708. This way, when the visitor subsequentlyaccesses the page, the tag container or tag can access the visitoridentifier from the cookie so that visitor data from the subsequentvisit can be combined with the prior visit's data. At block 2710, thevisitor processing system stores visitor data regarding the visitor'sinteractions with the content page in association with the visitorprofile.

The visitor processing system may access another identifier associatedwith a user, user agent (e.g., browser), or user device in place ofcookies for tracking user identities. Other identifiers that may be usedin place of cookies for tracking visitors include Internet Protocol (IP)addresses, Media Access Control (MAC) addresses (which may be obtainedusing a suitable protocol), device-specific identifiers (e.g., anystatic identifier associated with a device or software install on adevice), device fingerprints (which may include a profile of two or moreseparate features of a device or user that individually may not beidentifying, such as any combination of the user agent type (e.g.,browser type) of a user device, the language supported by a user'sbrowser, plugins installed in a user's browser, the user's IP address,operating system of the user device, etc.), mobile advertisingidentifiers, and the like. More generally, these identifiers and cookiesare examples of user-device-specific, user-agent specific, orclient-specific identifiers. Any reference to cookie-based identifiersherein may be interchangeable with any other user-device-specific,user-agent specific, or client-specific identifier.

Turning to FIG. 28, an example persistent visitor profile process 2800is shown. Like the process 2700, the persistent visitor profile process2800 can be implemented by any of the systems described herein or byanother computing device. The persistent visitor profile process 2800illustrates an example technique for associating a visitor with apersistent identifier of the visitor. This association with a persistentidentifier can enable visitor stitching to be performed.

At block 2802, a visitor with an existing visitor profile (see FIG. 27)supplies a persistent identifier in a visit to a content page. Asdescribed above, the persistent identifier can be an email address,social network identifier, login credential (e.g., username), or thelike associated with a user or visitor. The visitor to a content pagemay supply this information as part of a login process to the contentpage, for example, by filling in a form, supplying social networkinglogin information (using a service such as Facebook Connect™), or thelike. Since the user is supplying the persistent identifier to thecontent page, the persistent identifier becomes part of the documentobject model (DOM) of the page and can be read by the tag container oranother tag within the tag container. The tag or tag container cantransmit the persistent identifier or a hash thereof to the visitorprocessing system. If the tag or tag container passes the persistentidentifier without hashing (e.g., in the clear), the visitor processingsystem can hash the persistent identifier instead.

At block 2804, the visitor processing system supplements the visitorprofile of the visitor with the persistent identifier. Thus, when thevisitor visits the content page a subsequent time, the persistentidentifier can be associated with the visitor's subsequent visit. Forexample, at block 2806, the visitor visits the content page a subsequenttime without supplying the persistent identifier again. At block 2808,the tag container or tag can access the visitor identifier of thevisitor from a cookie in the visitor's browser and supply this visitorID to the visitor processing system. The visitor processing system canlook up the persistent identifier of the visitor based on the visitor IDat block 2810. The visitor processing system can then associate thepersistent identifier in the visitor profile with the visitor data ofthe subsequent visit to the content page at block 2812. Thus, once thevisitor supplies a persistent identifier, the visitor need not supply itagain for the visitor processing system to associate the persistentidentifier with the visitor's profile on subsequent visits. Further, thevisitor processing system can store the persistent identifier in acookie in the user device.

The following example illustrates a before and after view of a visitorprofile processed to include a persistent identifier based on theprocess 2800 of FIG. 28. In Table 1A below, assume the following areknown (timestamp values shown may not be intended to reflect anyparticular unit of time, but rather can demonstrate relative time):

TABLE 1A Visitor ID: 1a Visitor ID: 2b Account: acme Account: acmeVisit: first Visit: first Events: Events: event - timestamp 1 event -timestamp 2 event - timestamp 5 event - timestamp 6 event - timestamp 10event - timestamp 9 Visitor: 1a Visitor: 2b Account: acme Account: acmeVisit: second Visit: second Events: Events: event - timestamp 100event - timestamp 105 event - timestamp 110 event - timestamp 115event - timestamp 120 event - timestamp 125

The visitor ID shown for each visitor in Table 1A is an example of thevisitor identifier created with respect to the process 2700 of FIG. 27.For convenience, each visitor is also referred to by his or her visitorID, such as “Visitor 1a” or “Visitor 2b.” Each row in Table 1A and insubsequent tables represents a separate visit for each visitor, with twototal visits being represented in Table 1A.

Assume Visitor 1a visits the content page a third time, this timesupplying a persistent identifier as the following email address:user@acme.com. The visitor's profile may look as follows in Table 1Bbased on this third visit:

TABLE 1B Visitor: 1a Account: acme Visit: third Events: event -timestamp 200 event - timestamp 210 - supplies email=user@acme.com(visit not expired, that is, event has just been received)

When this latest event is received, the visitor processing system caninvoke a visitor stitching process (which may include one or more codemodules executing as a local code base within the visitor processingsystem). This visitor stitching process can merge events of the Visitor1a under the same persistent identifier. This process could result in avisitor profile such as the following shown in Table 2A:

TABLE 2A Visitor: Visitor: 1a _acme_email_user@acme.com_(—) replaced_by:Visit: first _acme_email_user@acme.com_(—) Events: event - timestamp 1event - timestamp 5 event - timestamp 10 Visitor:_acme_email_user@acme.com_(—) Visit: second Events: event - timestamp100 event - timestamp 110 event - timestamp 120 Visitor:_acme_email_user@acme.com_(—) Account: acme Visit: third Events: event -timestamp 200 event - timestamp 210

Note the following points: Visitor 2b is unaffected in this example andtherefore is not listed in Table 2A. In addition, Visitor 1a can beupdated with a replaced_by field, set to the new persistent ID. Anyfuture request or event directed to Visitor 1a can be directed to thereplaced_by visitor instead of the initial visitor identifier assignedby the process of FIG. 27. However, this initial visitor identifier canbe maintained in the visitor profile in some embodiments, and thepersistent identifier can supplement the initial visitor identifier.

The visitor stitching process performs the following steps in anembodiment: The visitor stitching process can check to see if thevisitor processing system has a live visitor in cache (e.g., currentlyinteracting with a content page) with the same persistent identifier(e.g., visitor_acme_email_user@acme.com_). In this case, there is not.The visitor stitching process can check to see if there is avisitor_acme_email_user@acme.com_ in the database (e.g., visitor profilerepository 160). In this case, there is not. The visitor stitchingprocess then creates the _acme_email_user@acme.com_ visitor. The visitorstitching process can merge Visitor 1a intoVisitor_acme_email_user@acme.com_. In this simple case, this merge caninclude copying some or all of the history from Visitor 1a to this newvisitor profile. The visitor stitching process can update the Visitor 1awith a ‘replaced_by’ field, set to_acme_email_user@acme.com_.

Next, assume another event is received from Visitor 1a, during the same(third) visit: event—timestamp 220. The Visitor Processing system caninspect the event to find that this can be associated with Visitor 1a.It can be useful to note that this event does not have to provide thepersistent identifier. Instead, the visitor processing system canretrieve Visitor 1a for updating (as it may for any event), but maynotice the existence of the replaced_by field. The value of this fieldcan be retrieved, in this case, _acme_email_user@acme.com_. The visitorprocessing system can then retrieve this visitor instead, and can updatethe visitor profile with the newly received event, resulting in thefollowing visitor profile update in Table 2B:

TABLE 2B Visitor: _acme_email_user@acme.com_(—) Account: acme Visit:third Events: event - timestamp 200 event - timestamp 210 event -timestamp 220

It should be clear that now each subsequent event (e.g., page load, formentry, etc.) of this visit can contribute to this visitor's(_acme_email_user@acme.com_) visit. Additionally, some or all events forfuture visits made by Visitor 1a can contribute tothe_acme_email_user@acme.com_visitor profile instead of the initialVisitor 1a profile in the same manner. In certain embodiments, some orall events for future visits made by Visitor 1a can contribute tothe_acme_email_user@acme.com_ Visitor instead in the same manner withoutthe need to continually supply the persistent identifier as describedabove.

Note that although the visitor stitching process has been invoked, theprocess may have additional features when another, seemingly distinctvisitor provides the same persistent identifier, as illustrated withrespect to FIG. 29A.

In FIG. 29A, an example visitor stitching process 2900 is shown, whichmay also be implemented by any system described herein or by anothercomputing device. At block 2902 of the process 2900, a first visitoralready having a persistent identifier in a visitor profile visits acontent page. This persistent identifier may have been associated withthe visitor profile using the process 2800 of FIG. 28. At block 2904, asecond visitor with a different visitor identifier (assigned, e.g.,using the process 2700 of FIG. 27) and no persistent identifier (or adifferent persistent identifier from the first visitor's) visits acontent page. The content page may be the same or a different pagevisited by the first visitor.

At block 2906, the second visitor supplies the same persistentidentifier as the first visitor. This persistent identifier may bedetected using, for example, the features described above with respectto FIG. 28. In response to receiving this persistent identifier, thevisitor processing system combines the visitor data for the first andsecond visitors into a single visitor profile at block 2908.

The following features illustrated with respect to Tables 3A through 5illustrate one example implementation of the process 2900 of FIG. 29A.

Continuing from the previous examples above, assume that sometime laterVisitor 2b returns for a third visit. This could result in the following(historical visits and current third visit) for visitor 2b, in Table 3A:

TABLE 3A Visitor: 2b Account: acme Visit: first Events: event -timestamp 2 event - timestamp 6 event - timestamp 9 Visitor: 2b Account:acme Visit: second Events: event - timestamp 105 event - timestamp 115event - timestamp 125 Visitor: 2b Account: acme Visit: third (thecurrent active visit) Events: event - timestamp 400

To this point, no visitor stitching has been used. Consider when anotherevent within the visit contains the same persistent identifier asVisitor 1a (the first visitor in this example), email=user@acme.com:

TABLE 3B Visitor: 2b Account: acme Visit: third Events: event -timestamp 400 event - timestamp 410 - supplies email=user@acme.com(visit not expired, that is, this event has just been received)

When this latest event is received, the visitor processing system caninvoke the visitor stitching process code module, which can merge thetwo visitor profiles (1a and 2b) as shown in Table 4:

TABLE 4 Visitor: Visitor: 1a Visitor: 2b _acme_email_user@acme.com_(—)replaced_by: replaced_by: Visit: first _acme_email_user_acme_email_user@ Events: @acme.com_(—) acme.com_(—) event - timestamp 1event - timestamp 2 event - timestamp 5 event - timestamp 6 event -timestamp 9 event - timestamp 10 Visitor: _acme_email_user@acme.com_(—)Visit: second Events: event - timestamp 100 event - timestamp 105event - timestamp 110 event - timestamp 115 event - timestamp 120event - timestamp 125 Visitor: _acme_email_user@acme.com_(—) Account:acme Visit: third Events: event - timestamp 200 event - timestamp 210Visitor: _acme_email_user@acme.com_(—) Account: acme Visit: fourth (thecurrent active visit) Events: event - timestamp 400 event - timestamp410

For example, the visitor stitching process can perform the followingsteps: The visitor stitching process checks to see if the visitorprocessing system has a ‘live’ visitor in cache with the same persistentidentifier (e.g., Visitor_acme_email_user@acme.com_). In this case,there is not. The visitor stitching process can check to see if therecan be a visitor_acme_email_user@acme.com_in the database (e.g., visitorprofile repository 160). In this case, there is. This visitor can beretrieved. The visitor stitching process then proceeds to merge Visitor2b into Visitor_acme_email_user@acme.com_. The visitor stitching processupdates the Visitor 2b with a “replaced_by” field, setto_acme_email_user@acme.com_. The visitor identifier “2b” may bepreserved in the database as well.

This merge process can reconstruct the visit history and reprocess eachevent of each visit as though it was received for the first time, in theway that any event can be processed by the visitor processing system.This can ensure or attempt to ensure that visitor attributes reflect theentirety of the history of events. Reconstructing visits can be done bycombining some or all overlapping visits into a single visit and bysorting the events in chronological order. From the above first visitsof each Visitor 1a and 2b, one can see in Table 5 that these visits haveoverlapping event timestamps:

TABLE 5 Visitor: 1a Visitor: 2b Account: acme Account: acme Visit: firstVisit: first Events: Events: event - timestamp 1 event - timestamp 2event - timestamp 5 event - timestamp 6 event - timestamp 10 event -timestamp 9

The overlapping events may have resulted from the visitor using twodevices (or two different browsers on one device) to access the samecontent page. Because these visits have overlapping event timestamps, asingle visit can be created, where the first event of the visit can bethe event with the oldest timestamp (smallest), the last event can bethe event with the newest timestamp (largest), and some or all otherevents may be in chronological order. This can result in the single“first” visit for visitor_acme_email_user@acme.com_ comprising of, inthis case, the above six events.

Visits with no overlapping events may be simply copied to the newlystitched visitor profile, as can be the case with the original visit“third” from Visitor 1a and the latest visit from Visitor 2b.

It should be clear that now each subsequent event of this visit cancontribute to this visitor's (_acme_email_user@acme.com_) visitorprofile. Additionally, some or all events for future visits made byVisitor 1a or 2b can contribute to the_acme_email_user@acme.com_ Visitorprofile instead in the same manner. In certain embodiments: some or allevents for future visits made by Visitor 1a or 2b can contribute tothe_acme_email_user@acme.com_ Visitor instead in the same manner withoutthe need to continually supply the persistent identifier from eithervisitor.

Further, due to the nature of the persistent identifier, Visitor 1a andVisitor 2b may be considered to be the same individual or user. Thisfact can facilitate performing cross-platform (device or web browser)tracking, where the tracking may not only be performed in real time ornear real time, but the individual's history can be considered to be asingular visitor's history. Visitor stitching can therefore allow thevisitor processing system to provide analysis of the individual'shistory in the singular.

Turning to FIG. 29B, another example visitor stitching process 2950 isshown. This process 2950 may also be performed by any of the systemsdescribed herein or by another computing device. The process 2950illustrates a situation where the persistent identifier is supplied by adifferent entity than the visitor or user. Rather, in this process 2950,the visitor identifier is an identifier provided by a third-party tagvendor.

As described above in more detail with respect to FIG. 1 et seq., thetag container 114 can reference multiple tags 116 from third party tagvendors/operators of the tag vendor systems 170. Individual tag vendorsmay each maintain their own visitor identifier for a visitor that isseparate from the visitor identifier maintained by the visitorprocessing system 140. When a persistent identifier supplied by avisitor is not available, the visitor processing system 140 can use anidentifier provided by another tag vendor to stitch two related visitorprofiles together. While this third-party identifier may be lesspersistent than a user email address or social network identifier, thethird party identifier is still referred to herein as a persistentidentifier. More generally, the third party identifier as well as theother persistent identifiers described herein (including email-based,social-based, or login-based) can also be referred to as externalidentifiers (since they may be created external to the visitorprocessing system 140) or alternative identifiers (as alternativesources of identification to the visitor processing system-generatedidentifier).

With continued reference to FIG. 29B, at block 2952, a first visitorvisits a content page. The visitor processing system assigns the firstvisitor a first identifier at block 2954, similar to as described abovewith respect to FIG. 27. A tag vendor assigns the first visitor avendor-specific identifier at block 2956, also using (for example)similar techniques as described above with respect to FIG. 27.

At block 2958, a second visitor visits a content page (which may or maynot be the same content page that the first visitor visited). The secondvisitor is assigned a second identifier by the visitor processing system2960. This identifier would differ in some embodiments from theidentifier assigned to the first visitor. At block 2962, the tag vendorassigns the second visitor the same vendor-specific identifier as thefirst visitor. The visitor processing system can recognize that thisvendor-specific identifier is the same for both visitors and combine thevisitor data for both visitors into a single visitor profile at block2964.

b. Example Distributed Visitor Stitching Process

The above sequences demonstration example logic of the visitor stitchingprocess. However, embodiments described herein go further to functionwithin a distributed environment including multiple computing devices,such as multiple physical and/or virtual servers, which may begeographically dispersed or co-located (e.g., in one or more datacenters). A distributed environment can add additional complexity thatcan be accounted for as shown in an example distributed visitorstitching process 3000 of FIG. 30. With respect to the process 3000,visitor profiles can be assigned to partitions in the distributedsystem. Each partition can represent a logical grouping of physicaland/or virtual servers (referred to as visitor processors for theremainder of this specification). Each visitor processor can implementthe features of any of the systems described herein. The partitions canbe numbered, for example, from 0 to N (where N is an integer). As newvisitor processors are brought online, they can be assigned to one ofthe partitions or a range of partitions. Visitor identifiers, whetherpersistent or assigned by a visitor processor, can be hashed into anumerical value that corresponds to a partition. Thus, visitor profilescan be assigned to a single partition in one embodiment so that eachtime a visitor event occurs, the same partition handles that visitor'sprofile. In this manner, visitor profiles can be kept consistent acrossa distributed computing environment.

An example of partitioning will now be described in more detail. In alocal or non-distributed (non-clustered) environment, the check for alive visitor can involve a query into the local cache of activevisitors. However, in a distributed (e.g., clustered) environment, therecan exist any number of visitor processor instances, each with a portionof the live visitors (e.g., who are currently visiting content pages).The portion of the live visitors each visitor processor manages can bedeterministic, based on a partitioning algorithm for consistent hashing.A partition, in this case, can be a slot that represents an equalsubportion of the total range of capacity. The partitioning algorithmassumes N number of available partitions. Each visitor processor can beassigned a range of partitions, based on the total number of visitorprocessors in the cluster. Then, as a visitor identifier (notnecessarily the persistent identifier) enters the load balancer, a loadbalancer (e.g., the load balancer 2576 of FIG. 25) can calculate thepartition to which that visitor can be assigned. This calculation can bea simple yet deterministic arithmetic modulus of the identifier's hashcode (also deterministic).

For example, assume a cluster of four Visitor Processors. Each canmanage one-fourth of the partitions. Assume a total partition count of100. In this case, each Visitor Processor can be assigned 25 partitionsas shown in Table 6:

TABLE 6 VP1 VP2 VP3 VP4 Partitions 0-24 Partitions 25-49 Partitions50-74 Partitions 75-99

A partition can be deterministically determined from a unique identifierusing an equation such as the following:

f(x)=h(x)% N  (1)

where x can be the visitor identifier, h(x) can be a deterministic hashcode algorithm which converts an identifer into a numerical value, and Ncan be the number of visitor processors in the cluster.

With specific reference to FIG. 30, at block 3002, an event is receivedby a target visitor processor. The target visitor processor may beselected based on an initial hash of a visitor identifier associatedwith the event. If no visitor identifier or persistent identifier areassociated with the event, the target visitor processor may be selectedrandomly or using another load-balancing algorithm (e.g., by the loadbalancer 2576 of FIG. 25).

At block 3004, the visitor processor checks to see if the visitorprocessing system has a live visitor in cache (or in the database) withthe same visitor identifier. If not, at block 3006, the visitorprocessor creates a new visitor (e.g., visitor profile) with an initialvisitor identifier at block 3006. From block 3006, the visitor processordetermines at block 3008 whether the event contains a custom identifier,such as a persistent identifier. If not, the visitor processor canupdate the new visitor profile with information from the event at block3010 and then end.

If the event does contain a custom identifier, the visitor processor cansave the visitor with the new custom (or persistent) identifierreplacing (or supplementing) the initial visitor identifier at block3018. The visitor processor can then hash this persistent identifier andsend the event to the target visitor processor based on the new hash atblock 3020, assuming the hash results in a different partition than theoriginal target visitor processor. This is done in an embodiment toensure or attempt to ensure that future visits by the visitor can besent to a single visitor processor partition for consistent hashing andconsistent maintenance of a single, unified visitor profile.

Thereafter, the new visitor processor determines at block 3022 whetherthe visitor already exists in the new visitor processor. The visitor mayalready exist in this visitor processor if the visitor has supplied thesame persistent identifier before. If not, the process proceeds toblocks 3006, 3008, and block 3010. Visitor stitching of the initialvisitor created at block 3002 and the newly created visitor can occur atblock 3006 in such a scenario. If the visitor already exists on the newvisitor processor, the process proceeds to block 3014, where theexisting visitor profile is retrieved. It is then determined whether thevisitor profile already has a persistent identifier at block 3016, andif so, the visitor can continue to be processed by the new visitorprocessor at block 3020 (e.g., by updating the visitor profile with theevent as in block 3010).

Returning again to the initial scenario of block 3004, if the visitoridentifier does exist on the initial target visitor processor, theexisting visitor can be retrieved at block 3014, and the process 3000can flow through the blocks discussed above according to the flow shownin FIG. 30.

Thus, in certain embodiments, a solution to ensuring or attempt toensure that visitor stitching operates correctly in a distributedenvironment can be to forward the event that contains a persistentidentifier to a correct visitor processor based on the partition derivedby the persistent identifier. This forwarding can include as a payload,the content of the live visitor represented by the originating visitoridentifier. It may be tempting by a software developer to simplyrecognize the persistent identifier within the load balancer in additionto the standard visitor identifier and simply send the event to thecorrect visitor processor directly. But it should be noted that doing somight be less desirable in an embodiment, as this would skip andincorrectly ignore any ongoing live information collected so far withinthe initial target visitor processor represented by the standard visitoridentifier. Nevertheless, such an approach can be used in otherembodiments.

c. Example Visitor Stitching with Multiple Persistent Identifiers

It can be desirable to ensure or attempt to ensure that the visitorstitching process works as expected in the case a visitor can beassociated with more than one persistent identifier. Some or all of theabove examples demonstrate the case of a single persistent identifier.When an additional persistent identifier is presented, the visitorstitching process can extend and repeat the stitching process for everyunique persistent identifier presented.

For example, assume the visitor that was stitched on a single persistentidentifier from the above example:

TABLE 7A Visitor: Visitor: 1a _acme_email_user@acme.com_(—) replaced_by:Visit: first _acme_email_user@acme.com_(—) Events: event - timestamp 1event - timestamp 5 event - timestamp 10 Visitor:_acme_email_user@acme.com_(—) Visit: second Events: event - timestamp100 event - timestamp 110 event - timestamp 120 Visitor:_acme_email_user@acme.com_(—) Account: acme Visit: third Events: event -timestamp 200 event - timestamp 210

Next, assume the visitor later returns for a fourth visit, and duringthe visit, the visitor presents a second identifier: facebookid=‘ABC’

TABLE 7B Visitor: 1a Account: acme Visit: fourth Events: event -timestamp 300 event - timestamp 310 - supplies facebookid=ABC (visit notexpired, that can be, this event has just been received)

In this case, because the visitor stitching process can recognize theevent field ‘facebookid’ as a persistent identifer, the visitorstitching process can occur again. However, this process does not occurin an embodiment until after the event has been associated withthe_acme_email_user@acme.com_ visitor. For example, the facebookid fieldmay not be considered until after the event has been fully processed andassociated with the correct visitor. Then additional identifiers can beconsidered.

Further, in order to correctly associate both persistent identifiers,the newly generated visitor identifier can consider both persistentidentifiers. Recall that in the single persistent identifier case, thegenerated identifer resulted in _acme_email_user@acme.com_. Now in thecase of multiple identifiers, some or all of them can be considered. Inthis case, yet another new identifier can be created by concatenatingthese identifiers as such:

_acme_email_user@acme.com_+_acme_facebookid_ABC_ to produce:

_acme_email_user@acme.com_acme_facebookid_ABC_

Note that the order of these identifers may be non-random (or insteadmay be), and can be deterministic. This can be achieved by the order inwhich they were received (as they coincidentally show here), but insteadmay be concatenated in alphanumerical sort order for easier processing.This would result in the ‘facebookid’ field being appended to the end ofthe ‘email’ field.

The same visitor stitching process can then occur as in the aboveexamples, and can then result in the following in Table 8:

TABLE 8 Visitor: Visitor: Visitor: 1a _acme_email_user@acme.com_(—)_acme_email_user replaced_by: _acme_facebookid_ABC_(—) @acme.com_(—)_acme_email_user@ac Visit: first me.com_acme_facebo Events: replaced_by:okid_ABC_(—) event - timestamp 1 _acme_email_user event - timestamp 5@acme.com_acme event - timestamp 10 _facebookid_ABC_(—) Visitor:_acme_email_user@acme.com_(—) _acme_facebookid_ABC_(—) Visit: secondEvents: event - timestamp 100 event - timestamp 110 event - timestamp120 Visitor: _acme_email_user@acme.com_(—) _acme_facebookid_ABC_(—)Account: acme Visit: third Events: event - timestamp 200 event -timestamp 210 Visitor: _acme_email_user@acme.com_(—)_acme_facebookid_ABC_(—) Account: acme Visit: fourth Events: event -timestamp 300 event - timestamp 310

Note that Visitor 1a has now been updated with the correct ‘replaced_by’field, so that future events can be forwarded to the correctmulti-stitched visitor. Additionally, the original stitched visitor,_acme_email_user@acme.com_, has also been updated to reflect the furthersecond stitching resulting in the visitor_acme_email_user@acme.com_acme_facebookid_ABC_.

V. Terminology

Many other variations than those described herein will be apparent fromthis disclosure. For example, depending on the embodiment, certain acts,events, or functions of any of the algorithms described herein can beperformed in a different sequence, can be added, merged, or left outaltogether (e.g., not all described acts or events are necessary for thepractice of the algorithms). Moreover, in certain embodiments, acts orevents can be performed concurrently, e.g., through multi-threadedprocessing, interrupt processing, or multiple processors or processorcores or on other parallel architectures, rather than sequentially. Inaddition, different tasks or processes can be performed by differentmachines and/or computing systems that can function together.

The various illustrative logical blocks, modules, and algorithm stepsdescribed in connection with the embodiments disclosed herein can beimplemented as electronic hardware, computer software, or combinationsof both. To clearly illustrate this interchangeability of hardware andsoftware, various illustrative components, blocks, modules, and stepshave been described above generally in terms of their functionality.Whether such functionality is implemented as hardware or softwaredepends upon the particular application and design constraints imposedon the overall system. The described functionality can be implemented invarying ways for each particular application, but such implementationdecisions should not be interpreted as causing a departure from thescope of the disclosure.

The various illustrative logical blocks and modules described inconnection with the embodiments disclosed herein can be implemented orperformed by a machine, such as a general purpose processor, a digitalsignal processor (DSP), an application specific integrated circuit(ASIC), a field programmable gate array (FPGA) or other programmablelogic device, discrete gate or transistor logic, discrete hardwarecomponents, or any combination thereof designed to perform the functionsdescribed herein. A general purpose processor can be a microprocessor,but in the alternative, the processor can be a controller,microcontroller, or state machine, combinations of the same, or thelike. A processor can include electrical circuitry configured to processcomputer-executable instructions. In another embodiment, a processorincludes an FPGA or other programmable device that performs logicoperations without processing computer-executable instructions. Aprocessor can also be implemented as a combination of computing devices,e.g., a combination of a DSP and a microprocessor, a plurality ofmicroprocessors, one or more microprocessors in conjunction with a DSPcore, or any other such configuration. A computing environment caninclude any type of computer system, including, but not limited to, acomputer system based on a microprocessor, a mainframe computer, adigital signal processor, a portable computing device, a devicecontroller, or a computational engine within an appliance, to name afew.

The steps of a method, process, or algorithm described in connectionwith the embodiments disclosed herein can be embodied directly inhardware, in a software module stored in one or more memory devices andexecuted by one or more processors, or in a combination of the two. Asoftware module can reside in RAM memory, flash memory, ROM memory,EPROM memory, EEPROM memory, registers, hard disk, a removable disk, aCD-ROM, or any other form of non-transitory computer-readable storagemedium, media, or physical computer storage known in the art. An examplestorage medium can be coupled to the processor such that the processorcan read information from, and write information to, the storage medium.In the alternative, the storage medium can be integral to the processor.The storage medium can be volatile or nonvolatile. The processor and thestorage medium can reside in an ASIC.

Conditional language used herein, such as, among others, “can,” “might,”“may,” “e.g.,” and the like, unless specifically stated otherwise, orotherwise understood within the context as used, is generally intendedto convey that certain embodiments include, while other embodiments donot include, certain features, elements and/or states. Thus, suchconditional language is not generally intended to imply that features,elements and/or states are in any way required for one or moreembodiments or that one or more embodiments necessarily include logicfor deciding, with or without author input or prompting, whether thesefeatures, elements and/or states are included or are to be performed inany particular embodiment. The terms “comprising,” “including,”“having,” and the like are synonymous and are used inclusively, in anopen-ended fashion, and do not exclude additional elements, features,acts, operations, and so forth. Also, the term “or” is used in itsinclusive sense (and not in its exclusive sense) so that when used, forexample, to connect a list of elements, the term “or” means one, some,or all of the elements in the list. Further, the term “each,” as usedherein, in addition to having its ordinary meaning, can mean any subsetof a set of elements to which the term “each” is applied.

Disjunctive language such as the phrase “at least one of X, Y and Z,”unless specifically stated otherwise, is to be understood with thecontext as used in general to convey that an item, term, etc. may beeither X, Y, or Z, or a combination thereof. Thus, such conjunctivelanguage is not generally intended to imply that certain embodimentsrequire at least one of X, at least one of Y and at least one of Z toeach be present.

Unless otherwise explicitly stated, articles such as “a” or “an” shouldgenerally be interpreted to include one or more described items.Accordingly, phrases such as “a device configured to” are intended toinclude one or more recited devices. Such one or more recited devicescan also be collectively configured to carry out the stated recitations.For example, “a processor configured to carry out recitations A, B andC” can include a first processor configured to carry out recitation Aworking in conjunction with a second processor configured to carry outrecitations B and C.

While the above detailed description has shown, described, and pointedout novel features as applied to various embodiments, it will beunderstood that various omissions, substitutions, and changes in theform and details of the devices or algorithms illustrated can be madewithout departing from the spirit of the disclosure. As will berecognized, certain embodiments of the inventions described herein canbe embodied within a form that does not provide all of the features andbenefits set forth herein, as some features can be used or practicedseparately from others.

1-20. (canceled)
 21. A method of operating a tag management system forconfiguring one or more data collection tags to gather data indicativeof user interactions with a content site, the method comprising:operating a first instance of a tag management system in a first cloudregion, the tag management system comprising functionality to generateand output one or more user interfaces for a first user to: select oneor more of a plurality of data collection tags to associate with a tagcontainer, the one or more of the plurality of data collection tagscomprising instructions that, when executed by a user system, cause theuser system to gather data indicative of user interactions with acontent site and transmit the data indicative of the user interactionsvia a computer network, associate the one or more of the plurality ofdata collection tags with the tag container responsive to a userselection, and map data sources in a content page of the content site todata sources gathered by the one or more data collection tags toconfigure the data sources in the content page for which the dataindicative of the user interactions is gathered by the one or more ofthe plurality of data collection tags; operating a second instance ofthe tag management system in a second cloud region different from thefirst cloud region simultaneous with operating the first instance of thetag management system in the first cloud region; communicating firstdata between the first cloud region and the second cloud region via oneor more computer network tunnels; and outputting second data associatedwith the first instance of the tag management system and the secondinstance of the tag management system via the one or more computernetwork tunnels for presentation to a second user.
 22. The method ofclaim 21, further comprising: receiving and storing, by the firstinstance of the tag management system, the data indicative of the userinteractions; and receiving and storing, by the second instance of thetag management system, the data indicative of the user interactions. 23.The method of claim 21, further comprising communicating, via thecomputer network, third data between the first instance of the tagmanagement system and an electronic device operated by the first user.24. The method of claim 21, further comprising: controlling, by a firstload balancer, requests to the first instance of the tag managementsystem; and controlling, by a second load balancer different from thefirst load balancer, requests to the second instance of the tagmanagement system.
 25. The method of claim 21, wherein the secondinstance of the tag management system operates to provide redundantaccess to the tag management system relative to the first instance ofthe tag management system.
 26. The method of claim 21, wherein thesecond data comprises operation data for the first instance of the tagmanagement system and the second instance of the tag management system.27. The method of claim 21, wherein the one or more computer networktunnels comprises one or more virtual private network tunnels.
 28. Themethod of claim 21, further comprising assigning a first nonpublicnetwork address to the first instance of the tag management system and asecond nonpublic network address to the second instance of the tagmanagement system.
 29. The method of claim 21, further comprisingobscuring, by an electronic device, a first network address assigned tothe first instance of the tag management system and a second networkaddress assigned to the second instance of the tag management system.30. The method of claim 21, wherein the first cloud region isimplemented in a first data center, and the second cloud region isimplemented in a second data center different from the first datacenter.
 31. The method of claim 21, wherein the first cloud region isimplemented as a first virtual machine, and the second cloud region isimplemented as a second virtual machine different from the first virtualmachine.
 32. The method of claim 21, further comprising operating afirst content delivery network and a second content delivery networkseparate from the first content delivery network, the first contentdelivery network and the second content delivery network redundantlystoring the one or more of the plurality of data collection tags. 33.The method of claim 32, further comprising determining, by a domain namesystem, whether a selection criteria indicates to obtain the one or moreof the plurality of data collection tags from the first content deliverynetwork or the second content delivery network.
 34. The method of claim33, wherein the selection criteria comprises a latency in communicationbetween the domain name system and either the first content deliverynetwork or the second content delivery network.
 35. The method of claim34, further comprising indicating, by the domain name system, to obtainthe one or more of the plurality of data collection tags from the firstcontent delivery network rather than the second content deliverynetwork.
 36. A configuration system for managing one or more datacollection tags to gather data indicative of user interactions with acontent site, the configuration system comprising: one or more firsthardware processors configured to operate a first instance of a tagmanagement system, the tag management system comprising functionality togenerate and output one or more user interfaces for a first user to:select one or more of a plurality of data collection tags to associatewith a tag container, the one or more of the plurality of datacollection tags comprising instructions that, when executed by a usersystem, cause the user system to gather data indicative of userinteractions with a content site and transmit the data indicative of theuser interactions via a computer network, associate the one or more ofthe plurality of data collection tags with the tag container responsiveto a user selection, and map data sources in a content page of thecontent site to data sources gathered by the one or more of theplurality of data collection tags to configure the data sources in thecontent page for which the data indicative of the user interactions isgathered by the one or more of the plurality of data collection tags;and one or more second hardware processors separate from the one or morefirst hardware processors, the one or more second hardware processorsbeing configured to operate a second instance of the tag managementsystem in a second cloud region different from the first cloud regionsimultaneous with the one or more first hardware processors operatingthe first instance of the tag management system in the first cloudregion, wherein the one or more first hardware processors and the one ormore second hardware processors are configured to communicate first databetween the first cloud region and the second cloud region via one ormore computer network tunnels, and the one or more first hardwareprocessors and the one or more second hardware processors are configuredto output second data associated with the first instance of the tagmanagement system and the second instance of the tag management systemvia the one or more computer network tunnels for presentation to asecond user.
 37. The configuration system of claim 36, wherein the oneor more first hardware processors are configured to receive and store toa first memory device the data indicative of the user interactions, andthe one or more second hardware processors are configured to receive andstore to a second memory device the data indicative of the userinteractions.
 38. The configuration system of claim 36, wherein the oneor more first hardware processors are configured to communicate, via thecomputer network, third data between the first instance of the tagmanagement system and an electronic device operated by the first user.39. The configuration system of claim 36, wherein the second instance ofthe tag management system provides redundant access to the tagmanagement system relative to the first instance of the tag managementsystem for an electronic device configured to access the tag managementsystem.
 40. The configuration system of claim 36, wherein the one ormore computer network tunnels comprises one or more virtual privatenetwork tunnels.